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When paired with cultural and art historical analysis, the diverse implications of these elements can contribute to our understanding of how the Codex Mendoza was manufactured. First of all, the almost complete homogeneity of the palette in the three parts of the codex and the recurring variations in the patterns of color application strongly suggests that it was painted in a single workshop, probably by two or more painters following a working procedure of pre-colonial origin. These artists primarily painted in a traditional style using a mostly traditional palette, but also introduced a restricted set of new stylistic and technological traits.
It has been proposed that Mesoamerican painters may have selected their painting materials based on the symbolic attributes of the specific items they were depicting (e.g., Magaloni Kerpel 2011; 2012; 2014; Giorgi, Chelazzi, and Magaloni Kerpel 2014). Such an assertion does not seem to be fully confirmed by our analyses of pre-colonial manuscripts, given that a single painting material is often used all over a whole codex (especially in the case of black, red, and blue items) and variations in this pattern seem to depend more on chromatic rather than on material attributes of paints (as is the case of the yellow/orange/brown and green items). A similar pattern seems to characterize the Codex Mendoza; no clear usage of specific painting materials seems to be linked to the symbolic qualities of the depicted items and different depictions of the same item (e.g. a yellow shield) can be painted either with an organic or an inorganic color. Again, yellow and brownish colors show a higher compositional variance, while the same black, red, and blue painting materials are used all over the manuscript. Similarly, the purported symbolic pairing of local lamp black and non-local minium in two parallel glosses on folio 1v (Gómez Tejada 2012, 88–89) has been dismissed by our analyses, which showed that they were actually painted with gall ink and cinnabar. It is debatable whether cinnabar is traditional/non-traditional or local/non-local.