Reproductive Horror: Sixteenth-Century Mexican Pictures in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

The appropriation and reproduction of pre-modern graphic materials constituted the ‘primitive’ in modernist and ethnographic discourses. George Bataille’s study of pre-Columbian historical anthropology and his misreading of a reproduction of a figure in a Mexican codex as a scene of human sacrifice initiated his anti-humanist project. Bataille’s parasitic dependency on the pre-modern provides an analytical point of departure towards a critique of modernist cultural relativism. This paper pursues incidents where horror is seated in humanist accounts of early modern mnemonic technologies and pictorial structures from the Arma Christi in a sixteenth-century Mexican featherwork mosaic to the ‘regressive’ Carolingian perspective discussed by Erwin Panofsky. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]