Insignia of Rank in the Nahua World: From the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century

3. Images of Rank by Region

187 3 imagesofrankbyregion DOI: 10.5876_9781607322412.c003 The Nahuatl-speaking altepetl and other communities of central Mexico have left a particularly rich and notable body of pictorial renderings of their native nobility in different media. Among these, precontact sculptures and postcontact manuscripts have survived as a significant corpus essential for understanding both the traditional iconography of rank of the Nahuas and their neighbors before the Spanish conquest and the form it took on through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Such imagery was surely recorded also in other materials and with other techniques (e.g., wall paintings) that have not survived as well, so it remains debatable whether the picture we have is fully representative. Status markers of both indigenous and European origin are a particularly conspicuous component of these visual records, conveying a variety of messages and meanings based on pictorial conventions that employed the relatively uncomplicated repertory of attributes. Also, assemblages of insignia not infrequently display noticeably regional traits. Moreover, even if only a small part of the exuberant collection of high-status insignia is reflected in conventional representations of the indigenous nobility, these items tend to form meaningful sets obeying specific rules, conventions, and cultural or political strategies. In addition, they tend to reflect not only local repertories but also the characteristics of particular genres in which the images were recorded. While the extant body of pre-Hispanic works of art sheds considerable light on the conventions employed in the Aztec period, the bulk of the pictorial record comes from postconquest times, both replicating the traditional ways and IMAGES OF RANK BY REGION 188 absorbing new, highly attractive status markers. As challenging as it is to try to trace the subtleties of European impact, it is more so to attempt to differentiate between the survival of the preconquest iconography of rank and its colonial transformations . In addition to foreign borrowings, changes may have entailed the inclusion of certain indigenous elements that were not necessarily part of local conventions before the onset of the colonial era. Insignia that were most widely recognized by Europeans as native status items could have been employed in documents intended for a Spanish audience. Yet in spite of these difficulties and limitations, I believe the extant pictorial corpus makes it possible to reconstruct the core of regional conventions of royal imagery, exploring the meaning of the symbols of rank they employ. The area studied reaches beyond the Valley of Mexico into other central Mexican Nahua communities and multiethnic regions subject in precontact times to Aztec political and cultural impact, encompassing many of the former imperial provinces located in the present states of Hidalgo, Guerrero, México, Morelos, Puebla, Tlaxcala, and Veracruz.1 the imPerial Core: meXiCo-tenoChtitlan and sUrroUndings Preconquest Sculpture Monuments The sources for studying Mexica royal iconography seem particularly propitious ; the sculptural corpus associated with Tenochtitlan accounts for a great part of extant elite precontact imagery from central Mexico, especially if compared to other Nahuatl-speaking communities. This body of material frequently provides a unique point of reference for images in native manuscripts produced in later times. Falling into several categories, these works of art convey different kinds of elite images, depending on the function of the artifact and the contexts and roles that are emphasized. Links between Mexica lords and supernatural patrons, expressed through a careful choice of appropriate insignia, emerge as a major thrust of this imagery, reflecting complex identities attributed to the huei tlatoque. Not surprisingly , these relationships disappear from postconquest depictions of the Nahua nobility, or at least become much more camouflaged and conventionalized, tending to employ regalia that are easy to identify as “secular” status symbols as well as skillfully adapting intended messages to new political and cultural strategies. A good example of pre-Hispanic imagery proclaiming the divine affinity of the leaders of Tenochtitlan are the sculptured panels known as the Bench Relief, one of the earliest extant Mexica monuments. Commissioned during the first phase of imperial expansion, probably between 1430 and 1469, they originally formed the sloping base of a bench, and were later reused during a periodic rebuilding of the Great Temple (Pasztory 1983, 144–46). The images highlight war duties of an IMAGES OF RANK BY REGION 189 anonymous leader, probably one of the Mexica rulers, accompanied by other males in military outfits, who converge on a sacrificial grass ball with ritual implements for autosacrifice. Significantly, as betrayed by a serpent...