Читать книгу The Codex Mendoza: new insights онлайн
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The rather limited set of colonial technological innovations identified on the Codex Mendoza leads us to the problem of the manuscript’s chronology, a topic that is also tackled on different basis and with different methodological approaches in other contributions in this book. As we saw, the Codex Mendoza palette seems to be more “innovative” than the one of the Codex Borbonicus, which was probably painted during the1530s; this assumption is based on the traditional dating of the Codex Mendoza to 1541-1542 (Robertson [1959] 1994, 87–90). On the other hand, the Codex Mendoza looks more technologically conservative than Codex De la Cruz Badianus, Beinecke Map, and Codex Florentinus. Despite some differences, the strong similarity between the palettes of Codex Mendoza and the Beinecke Map (arguably painted around 1565) is still noteworthy (Miller 2012, 3). Even if technological traits cannot be automatically taken as chronological indicators, our results suggest that the Codex Mendoza (more innovative than Codex Borbonicus and somewhat less innovative than the Beinecke Map) could have been painted somewhere between the 1530s and the 1560s. Within this rather ample time span, either the traditional dating of the manuscript to 1541-42 and the later date range of 1547-1552 convincingly proposed by Gómez Tejada (2012; see this volume too) would fit. In the absence of direct scientific dating of the actual manuscript, further specification cannot be achieved by means of purely technological comparisons between often loosely dated manuscripts. Thus, the task of more precisely dating Codex Mendoza should be more properly tackled by historical and art historical research.