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The Mapa Uppsala is the earliest known map of sixteenth-century Mexico City that was painted by indigenous artists after the city’s takeover by Spanish forces. It is one of the few indigenous-produ...

During the course of the sixteenth century, the Aztec (or Mexica) city of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco (present-day Mexico City) was transformed from a sweet-smelling lacustrine city into a foul one, the direct result of the Spanish invasion (1519–21). This article reconstructs both the sources of odors and culturally situated ideas about smell among the city’s Nahuatl-speaking residents. They are opposed to the ideas about smell held by settler colonists, derived from the framework of Hippocratic medicine. These imported ideas about acceptable smells (like those of urban slaughterhouses) and dangerous smells (swamps) came to have disastrous consequences as they played out in the unique environment of the Basin of Mexico.

Over the course of the sixteenth century in Mexico (New Spain), alphabetic writing replaced pictography as the chosen form of written expression in indigenous communities. A new social role, that of the native languageescribano(notary), emerged, eventually to become a principal cultural broker in the colonial period. Despite the indigenous escribano's importance, his origins and the source of his authority within the native sphere are poorly understood. This article offers a close reading of a corpus of hybrid pictographic-alphabetic documents, written in Nahuatl and created between 1553 and 1572 in the indigenouscabildo(town council) of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Within this important body, escribanos appear early in the documentary record; it was within the established indigenous ecosystem of governance that escribanos first found a niche.Here, pictography flourished, as did performances unique to the indigenous sphere. The corpus reveals how escribanos worked side by side with indigenoustlahcuilohqueh, or painters, who drew on a long-established tradition of manuscript painting and cartography to create property maps. These maps adhered to established codes, both social and visual. Initially preeminent in itself, the work of thetlahcuilohquehcame to supply meaning and public authority to the work of the escribano in this crucial formative period.

This collection of essays reconsiders a seminal 1961 article by George Kubler, the most important art historian of Latin America of the English-speaking world at the time of its writing. Often greeted with indifference or hostility, Kubler’s central claim of extinction is still a highly contested one. The essays in this section deal with Kubler’s reception in Mexico, the political stakes of his claim in relation to indigeneity, as well as the utility of Kubler’s categories and objects of “extinction” beyond their original framing paradigm.

Each of the four articles in this Dialogues draws on recent conservation and/or material analysis of a single work created in colonial Latin America, specifically New Spain, to explore the self-image of the artist as manifest through practice—that is, the techniques of manipulating a range of materials to achieve a desired aesthetic effect. The four foci are a featherwork miter and infulae, the Codex Mendoza, the Adoration of the Magi by Cristóbal de Villalpando, and a casta painting by Miguel Cabrera. The introductory essay argues that examining artistic practice is one avenue to ascertaining artists’ own choices about self-presentation. RESUMEN Cada uno de los cuatro ensayos se basa en la conservación reciente o el análisis material de una única obra creada en la América Latina colonial, específicamente en la Nueva España, para explorar la autoimagen del artista tal como esta se manifiesta a través de la práctica, es decir, el conjunto de técnicas desarrolladas por artistas para poder manipular diversos materiales a fin de lograr el efecto deseado. Los cuatro focos son una mitra e ínfulas de plumas, el Códice Mendoza, la Adoración de los Reyes Magos de Cristóbal de Villalpando y una pintura de casta de Miguel Cabrera. El ensayo introductorio sostiene que asignar un papel principal a la práctica de los artistas permite entender las propias decisiones de los artistas sobre la auto-presentación. RESUMO Cada um destes ensaios baseia-se em análises de conservação ou material recentes de um único trabalho criado na América Latina colonial, especificamente na Nova Espanha, para explorar a auto-imagem do artista como manifesta através da prática, isto é, o conjunto de técnicas que artistas desenvolveram para manipular os efeitos desejados de uma variedade de materiais. Os quatro focos são uma mítra e ínfulas em arte plumária, o Codex Mendoza, a Adoração dos Magos por Cristóbal de Villalpando e uma pintura de casta por Miguel Cabrera. O ensaio introdutório argumenta que atribuir um papel primário à prática dos artistas é chegar às próprias escolhas dos artistas sobre a auto-apresentação.

Within shifts affecting colonial studies, a ‘life-work model’ employed in colonial art history has been left unexamined. Developed by a contemporary of Michelangelo, Giorgio Vasari (Italy, 1511–1574), this methodology was grounded in particular European social conditions that allowed the creation of the ‘artist’ whose ‘artwork’ was the inalienable product of a single mind and hand. Following the art historical paths laid by Vasari in the viceroyalties leads to dead ends: indigenous artists who efface their individuality; painters who exist with little social or historical context; and artworks whose conservation denies finding the traces of the hands that made them. Because artworks were and are the connective tissue of complex social networks, reconfiguring concepts of ‘artist’ and ‘artwork’ and recasting them in accordance with social practices within Latin America, gains us purchase on how colonial subjects, in their engagement with their material worlds, came to be constructed.Resemblance to European ...

Across the last 25 years, digital projects on the visual culture of Latin America have begun to shape, ever more fundamentally, both research and teaching environments. To be sure, books and journal essays remain the dominant mode of publishing (and significantly so), but digital projects—made possible in part because of increasingly accessible databases and less expensive editing platforms—are becoming widely recognized as key elements in the visual and intellectual landscape. The visual culture of Spanish America (also known as colonial visual culture or viceregal visual culture) extends across three centuries, dating from roughly 1520 to 1820. Yet its history, which embraces both the physical traces of everyday life and ephemeral experiences, is arguably the least familiar of Latin America’s artistic and material legacies, especially outside Latin American Studies. Nonetheless, the period has inspired a suite of projects that, considered together, highlight the current potentials (and limits) of digital work, provide useful models for future research, and open onto debates relevant across the digital humanities (as they are currently called). If this is the basic landscape, then what are the important issues when it comes to the intersections of digital technologies and colonial visual culture? This question is considered here along three avenues. First, what can be achieved with existing software, particularly imaging software, and the inherent epistemological assumptions imbedded in software commonly used? This topic receives the most attention because future research depends so heavily upon our perceptions and understandings of present technological capabilities. The second theme considered is accessibility. Given that institution-driven projects, most often online ventures sponsored by a museum or a library, have opened certain collections to an online public, what are the implications of the accessibility they offer, and how might such databases shape the parameters of research—both in the data they provide and in the kinds of questions their technologies make it possible to pose and answer? Finally, consideration is given to the possibilities and potentials for collaboration that the online environment offers in the study of visual culture of Latin America. To set a framework for discussion, this article begins with a broad view, “The Object(s) of Visual Culture,” and then turns to examples of scholar-driven projects currently online. Typically, these are generated by scholars working at universities and dependent upon both internal and external funding. The sections “Seeing Images, Knowing Landscapes” and “Epistemological Assumptions” not only describe examples, but also explore the modes of interpretation that digital environments enable and the habits of viewing that are produced as a result. Because scholar-driven projects do not exist in isolation, the article turns to institution-driven projects, represented primarily by digitized museum collections and archives, which have become central components of the research environment. Many projects in this vein are well-described elsewhere—our focus therefore rests on the effects on the larger research landscape, in a section called “Accessibility, Canonicity, Finance.” Lastly, issues related to collaboration are dealt with, in order to both address ideas that are being explored through digital work in other fields, but which have not yet surfaced with much force in the field of colonial visual culture, and to ask why.

The place-names that residents of the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan (today Mexico City) gave to their city were both descriptive of topography and commemorative of history. Largely effaced from the Spanish historical register, Mexico City's Nahuatl place-names were rescued from historical oblivion by José Antonio Alzate in the eighteenth century and again by Alfonso Caso in the twentieth. However, effacement is not equal to extinction, and this article argues for the continued use, even creation, of Nahuatl place-names into the eighteenth century. It suggests that the scholar's desire to use place-names as an index to a pre-Hispanic past has obscured the vital presence of the city's Nahua people, and their language, in the colonial period.

The map of Tenochtitlan published along with a Latin version of Hernan Cortes's letters (Nuremberg, 1524) was the first picture Europeans had of the Culhua‐Mexica city, the capital of the Aztec empire. The source of this woodcut map is unknown, and the author argues here that it was based on an indigenous map of the city. Once published in Europe, the city map and its companion map of the Gulf Coast, while certainly documentary, also assumed a symbolic function in supporting Cortes's (and thereby Spain's) just conquest of the Amerindian empire.