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18 Touring Aztecs (1522–1529) It is possible,” María Soledad Carrasco Urgoiti wrote in 1963, “that a complete study of American festivals would discover currents of mutual influence linking moros y cristianos in the New World” to their Spanish counterparts.1 Her suggestion of mutual influence is one that few have considered, let alone pursued with any rigor. We know that food traveled eastward: tomatoes, potatoes, corn, chocolate, turkeys, and tobacco all originated in the Americas and were unknown in Europe before the sixteenth century. In this chapter, we will weigh the earliest evidence that native artifacts and performers did likewise, that some of the artifacts wound up as costumes worn by European performers, and that some of the native routines were imitated by Europeans. Native art was soon displayed in Europe. Among the souvenirs Columbus brought home with him in 1493 were “masks made of fish bones carved to look like pearls, and belts of the same material, admirably contrived.” Three years later, after his second voyage, he presented Ferdinand and Isabella with “many masks . . . with eyes and ears of gold.”2 Portuguese ships soon brought artifacts from Brazil, where they had first landed in 1500. In an Adoration of the Magi, painted for the Cathedral of Viseu (Beira Alta) around 1505, one of the oriental wise men wears “a radial feather crown like those worn by several tribes of Brazilian Indians” and “carries an accurately rendered Tupinamba arrow.” Europeans still thought of America as an outpost of Asia. Along the same lines, a German woodcut from 1517–1518, claiming to depict the “people of Calcutta,” mixes an “elephant and its turbaned mahout” with figures wearing “the feather skirts and head-dresses of American Indians ,” some of whom carry “clubs of a Brazilian type” while others hold “a large Brazilian macaw” and “two ears of maize.” Reversing the positive judgment of the Adoration of the Magi, an anonymous Portuguese Inferno, painted around 1550, crowns both “the devil presiding over the torments of the damned” and one of his assistants with “Brazilian featherwork.”3 William Sturtevant remarks that “the Tupinamba attire and weapons” in such works “must have been based on direct observation of . . . the artifacts.”4 An exhibition of the first shipment of treasures sent back by Cortés to Charles V was mounted in Brussels in 1520, a full year before the fall of Tenochtitlan, and so impressed Albrecht Dürer that he wrote, “All the days of my life, I have seen nothing that reaches my heart so much as these, for among them I have seen wonderfully artistic things and have admired the subtle ingenuity of men in foreign lands.” Although Dürer never reproduced any of these treasures in his own art, some have suggested that his scheme for an ideal city was influenced by Cortés’s map of 173 “ Tenochtitlan and that other northern European artists, such as the Dutch painter Jan Mostaert and the anonymous sculptors who carved masked and plumed faces atop the columns in the palace of the prince-bishop of Liège, produced work directly influenced by the Mexican treasures.5 Cortés sent a further “vast hoard of treasure” eastward across the Atlantic in 1522. Two shiploads were distributed in Spain, mostly to the Crown but some to influential politicians and clergy. Bishop Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, Charles V’s chief adviser on colonial affairs and something of a connoisseur of the arts, received “two specially made cloaks in the style of a bishop’s robe, one in blue, with a heavy gold border, the collar with elaborate plumes and a white border; the other in green, with a collar decorated by masks.” A third ship, captured by French pirates, was diverted to Dieppe. Some of its treasures showed up in a private masque staged at nearby Varengeville in 1527. Dressed in American gold, jewels, and feathered cloaks, Alexander the Great and other “heroes of antiquity” strode across a platform that “had been made by Indians and brought from America.”6 On the whole, “the artistic impact of Mexico” was modest: “cultured Europeans, still busy shedding the influence of the Middle Ages, were in no mood for ‘barbarism.’”7 Nevertheless , in playful rather than high artistic mood, they were happy to dress up in exotic costumes. And, at times, they were intrigued by native performers. Native Americans, some of them dancers, acrobats, jugglers, and costumed warriors , traveled to Europe very...

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