Writing Collaborative Histories in Early Colonial New Spain: A Study of the Multiple Artistic Hands in Codex Azcatitlan

WRITING COLLABORATIVE HISTORIES IN EARLY COLONIAL NEW SPAIN: A STUDY OF THE MULTIPLE ARTISTIC HANDS IN CODEX AZCATITLAN Angela Marie Herren University of North Carolina, Charlotte Codex Azcatitlan is an annals history from central Mexico that provides an indigenous account of the origin of the Mexica (Aztec) people and the foundation of their empire, the imperial rulers of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, and events related to the Spanish conquest and early colonial period (figs. 1–3).1 Its tlacuiloque (artist-scribes; sing. tlacuilo) wrote their history using the Pre-Hispanic pictographic writing system that prevailed before the arrival of the Spaniards, but they blended European Renaissance and indigenous Mexican visual traditions to create a truly hybrid manuscript. Throughout the document, the tlacuiloque experiment with color and shading, depth and perspective, and the naturalistic rendering of landscape and the human figure. Though the manuscript consists primarily of images, alphabetic glosses in Nahuatl occasionally explicate the narrative content. Draft lines, empty spaces in the composition, and the sporadic use of color indicate that Codex Azcatitlan’s tlacuiloque did not finish their project. Today, the manuscript consists of twenty-five leaves of European paper painted front and back and bound together like a book.2 Inconsistencies in the narrative content indicate that a few leaves have been lost. The leaves measure twenty-one centimeters high and twenty-eight centimeters wide. The images flow across the facing pages, adapting the continuous content of a Pre-Hispanic accordion or screenfold document to the two-page spread of a bound book. For example, the path that guides the protagonists in the migration segment drops off on one page and appears in the same spot when one turns the page. Though the manuscript conveys a cohesive narrative content, it ends abruptly in the colonial segment , indicating that the narrative is unfinished or that a final segment has been lost. Throughout the manuscript, many of the compositions remain incomplete, providing valuable insights into the working processes of the tlacuiloque. Although scholarly interest in Codex Azcatitlan has escalated, very few studies discuss the multiple artistic hands that appear in the manuscript. In the mid-twentieth century, Robert Barlow wrote the first detailed study of Codex Azcatitlan and suggested that two artists worked on the manuscript. The first, a skilled painter, produced the beginning of the manuscript, all of the imperial history, and all of the colonial history.3 C  2012 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 23 The Latin Americanist, March 2012 Figure 1. Codex Azcatitlan, Plates 1v–2r. Reproduced with permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Figure 2. Codex Azcatitlan, Plate 5r. Reproduced with permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The second, an apprentice, produced the bulk of the migration narrative , from after the stop at Coatlicamac to just before the establishment at Tenochtitlan.4 Ten years later, in his groundbreaking study Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period, Donald Robertson offered a conflicting view. In his brief comments on the Codex Azcatitlan, he suggested that more than one artist worked on the final colonial segment and that, “In this work, more than one artist seems to have alternated with the main master of the codex.”5 24 Herren Figure. 3. Codex Azcatitlan, Plates 5v–6r. Reproduced with permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. In 1995, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Société des Américanistes collaborated on the publication of a color facsimile of the manuscript that brought Codex Azcatitlan to a much wider scholarly audience .6 Since then, several authors including Michel Graulich, Elizabeth Hill Boone, Federico Navarrete, and Maria Castañeda de la Paz have studied the narrative and historical content. Less attention has been paid to the stylistic aspects of the manuscript. In a 2004 article, Mexican historian Federico Navarrete examined some of the stylistic choices of these tlacuiloque, noting the use of European conventions to depict landscape, three-dimensional buildings, groups of people, and elaborate drawings of sacrificial victims. Although Navarrete noted the visual heterogeneity of Codex Azcatitlan, he argued that, it “is a highly coherent document, since its tlacuilome [tlacuiloque] followed a carefully defined narrative program, which determined the different...