The Colors of the New World: Artists, Materials, and the Creation of the Florentine Codex

by Kerpel Magaloni Diana

In August 1576, in the midst of an outbreak of the plague, the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and twenty-two indigenous artists locked themselves inside the school of Santa Cruz de Tlaltelolco in Mexico City with a to create nothing less than the first illustrated encyclopedia of the New World. Today this twelve-volume manuscript is preserved in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence and is widely known as the Florentine Codex.
 
A monumental achievement, the Florentine Codex is the single most important artistic and historical document for studying the peoples and cultures of pre-Hispanic and colonial Central Mexico. It reflects both indigenous and Spanish traditions of writing and painting, including parallel columns of text in Spanish and Nahuatl and more than two thousand watercolor illustrations prepared in European and Aztec pictorial styles. This volume reveals the complex meanings inherent in the selection of the pigments used in the manuscript, offering a fascinating look into a previously hidden symbolic language. Drawing on cutting edge approaches in art history, anthropology, and the material sciences, the book sheds new light on one of the world’s great manuscripts―and on a pivotal moment in the early modern Americas.

Genres: Art History

80 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2014

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

pretty pictures

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

read for my color & colonialism seminar. first part doesn’t do the best job discussing ixiptla but the second part has some really compelling arguments and case studies

[Daniel Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really cool book, because it used sensing, chemistry, etc. to explore the ideological implications of the artistic choices in the Florentine Codex. It's like the perfect examination of the subaltern, since the author is breaking down the indigenous worldview and cultural meaning present in the Codex that were/are not always obvious to the Western reader.