Читать книгу The Codex Mendoza: new insights онлайн

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This said, we wish to clarify that we are not at all denying the fact that painting colors were imbued with deep symbolic significance derived from their materiality. But, in our opinion, this significance seems to be more generally linked to the brilliance of mostly organic painting materials used on pre-colonial codices. These materials were perceived as an aesthetic attribute expressing the “bursting” and “flowery” essence of manuscripts, which were intended to be chanted rather than read; thus, the manuscript pages were actual materializations of Mesoamerican “flowery speech” (Domenici 2016). This pattern seems to have been progressively broken during the early colonial times, when a host of local and foreign inorganic and more opaque pigments appeared on the codex painters’ palette, probably as a reflection of the changed context of production and performance of pictorial manuscripts increasingly manufactured and perceived as “books” in the European sense of the term (Domenici et al. 2018). With its still limited use of inorganic pigments and European-derived materials, the Codex Mendoza seems to stand at the very beginning of this process of early colonial material experimentation.