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Previous observations on the colors of the Codex Mendoza

The importance of considering the painting materials used by the painters of the Codex Mendoza was first stressed in 1938 by James Cooper Clark. Because he had no possibility of actually studying the materials of the manuscript, in his famous work, he simply listed the known native pigments used by ancient Mesoamerican painters as they had been recorded by Friar Bernardino de Sahagún in Book XI of his Florentine Codex (Clark 1938, 9). Two decades later, Donald Robertson published his detailed observations on the painting technique employed in the codex; he noted the coexistence of two different ways of applying colors: the flat washes, which he considered to be the traditional style of pre-colonial origin, and the use of one or more tones of a same color in order to create shades suggesting plasticity and tridimensionality, a trait that he considered to be a European-derived innovation. He also noted that these innovative traits are more abundant in the third part of the codex, the one with no pre-colonial models. In this section, they appear together with other novel elements such as the use of European perspective and the more realistic, “willowy” human figures engaging in a wide range of actions and facing right (that is, following the European reading order from left to right). Despite these differences, Robertson ([1959] 1994, 102–7) supposed that a single painter worked on the codex.