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chapter 4 k Aztec Regalia and the Reformation of Display Carina L. Johnson After Hernán Cortés shipped the first cargos of gold, silver, gems, and feather treasure from Mexico to Europe, they were viewed with marvel and admiration. The treasure was a gift from the conquistador to Charles V, king of Castile and elected Holy Roman Emperor. Albrecht Dürer’s delighted view of these objects, at Charles’s court in Brussels in August 1520, is often quoted: I have seen these things, which have been brought to the King [Charles] from the new golden land. . . . They are so splendid, that one would treasure them at a hundred thousand guldens’ worth. And I have not seen anything, in all my living days, that delights my heart as these objects do. I have seen marvelously artistic things and I am amazed at the subtle craftsmanship of the people in the foreign land.1 Fifteen years later, in May 1535, the ambassador Martı́n de Salinas reported on the fate of some of this gold and silver treasure from the Americas: ‘‘[Charles] has ordered all the moneyers of his kingdom to come to this city [the port of Barcelona], so that they may melt down all the gold and silver of the Indies into coins.’’2 Much of the gold and silver treasure from the Americas was liquidated by the end of the 1530s, while other objects disappeared for decades before reappearing in the new collections of curiosities. What happened in Europe during the fifteen years between 1520 and 1535, between early reception and later destruction of precious Mexican objects? Dürer’s admiration has often been held up as a sign that he was an exceptional artist, one who transcended a dominant rejection of a ‘‘pagan’’ aesthetic.3 If, however, this treasure’s reception 84 carina l. johnson in the 1520s is examined in the context of European attitudes toward materiality, sacrality, and rulership, a more complex story unfolds. Precious and valuable objects were transferred across the Atlantic Ocean in a series of exchanges, from Moctezuma as ruler of the Aztec Empire to Hernán Cortés, from Cortés to his own sovereign Charles as king of Castile, and then from Charles as elected Holy Roman Emperor to several Habsburg family members. From the treasure’s entry into Cortés’s possession, the exchanges illuminate treasure’s shifting cultural significance during its first fifteen years in Europe. Mexican treasure’s received value and its subsequent revaluation in the 1520s and 1530s reflect broader cultural transformations of treasure during the early Reformation era. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, treasure was a vitally important tool for ambitious rulers. In the prehistory of collecting, European treasuries had not yet become cabinets of collection or Kunstkammern.4 A ruler’s material and symbolic worth could be expanded through the possession of treasure and, thus, princes engaged in competitive accumulation of such splendid and marvelous objects.5 Mere wealth was inadequate for the acquisition of treasure, particularly treasure with great symbolic significance; only princes, whether secular or ecclesiastic, legitimately possessed such objects. The values of treasure ran the gamut between the more material and the more symbolic. The distinction between the two types was illustrated in two of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I’s monumental print projects, the Triumphal Arch (Ehrenpforte) and the Triumphal Procession (Triumphzug). Maximilian, Charles V’s grandfather , had planned a series of print projects to valorize his life and dynasty. Each print in a project could be viewed as a scene, while the set of prints formed a larger spectacle when assembled as a whole. Thus, in the Triumphal Arch, the small captioned vignettes from Maximilian’s reign fit together to create a twodimensional , paper triumphal arch. One of the Triumphal Arch’s woodcuts, created ca. 1515 by Albrecht Altdorfer, described Maximilian’s treasury (Schatzkammer ). The woodcut depicted a secure room, with treasure stored in chests on the floor and displayed on separate platforms or tables set against walls to the left, center, and right of the viewer. The room’s organization mapped out a typology of treasure. Even the table covers suggested a hierarchy of value, from left to right: the table to the left was covered with a plain cloth, the center and right tables with fringed textiles signaling their greater value. The contents of the right-hand table were further elevated in importance by a canopy that sheltered this table and...

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