Florentine Codex: An Encyclopedia of Life in 16th-Century Mexico
The Florentine Codex is an encyclopedic accounting of life in 16th-century Mexico and an invaluable resource for understanding the exchange between European and Indigenous cultures during the Spanish conquest. Emerging from a time of societal upheaval, the codex was written as an attempt to record the culture and beliefs of the Aztec peoples of Mexico in the areas surrounding the once great city of Tenochtitlan. The work covers a broad array of topics, including religion, everyday life, native flora and fauna, and Indigenous perspectives on the conquest itself.
Written at a time when Spanish authorities had been and still were actively undermining Aztec culture and beliefs, the Florentine Codex represents an attempt to document and preserve a past and people being systematically censored. It is the product of many minds in collaboration, written in two different languages by numerous scribes and illuminated by a number of artists employing a uniquely syncretic style of illustration, all of which comes together to create a multifaceted depiction of the culture, language, and history of Aztec civilization immediately following the fall of the empire.
The Florentine Codex was completed sometime between the fall of 1575 and the spring of 1577 after nearly 30 years in the making. Composed of 12 illuminated books with a total of 2,446 pages and 2,472 illustrations, it is widely attributed to a Franciscan friar known as Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1499-1590). Though the modern title of the codex comes from the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, where it is housed today, scholars do not know what the original title was at the time of its completion. Sahagún himself referred to the text variously in his native Spanish as doze libros ( "twelve books"), obra ("work"), and, perhaps most expansively, Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España ("General History of the Things of New Spain"). While the codex certainly contains history, its scope is greater than even that title might suggest.
The contents of the Florentine Codex are summarized below:
Book 1: Prologue and the Gods
Book 2: Ceremonies of the Aztec Calendar
Book 3: Origin of the Gods and Mythology
Book 4: Astrology and Divinatory Practices
Book 6: Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy
Book 7: Natural Philosophy and Celestial Phenomena (Sun, Moon, and Stars)
Book 8: Lords of Tenochtitlan, Tlaltelolco, Tetzcoco, and Huexotla, Education and Customs of These Lords
Book 9: Merchants, Craftsmen, and Artisans
Book 10: The People, Occupations, and Anatomy
Book 11: Earthly Things, Natural History
Book 12: Conquest of Tenochtitlan, Tlatelolco from the Indigenous Perspective
The folios of this impressive work include text in two languages: Spanish, the language of the intended audience of the codex, and Nahuatl, the language of the Indigenous peoples of Mexico. While the text is bilingual, neither language represents a translation of the other. Instead, the texts exist in parallel, the Spanish frequently interpreting, abbreviating, adding to, or omitting information from the content of the Indigenous language. For this reason, modern scholars have stressed the need to read the two texts in conjunction rather than one on behalf of the other: Though the entries can be read side by side, their meanings are not always in harmony. There is an ebb and flow in the presence of the Spanish and Nahuatl texts; sometimes there is less written in one language than the other, sometimes one is absent from a folio altogether, and even when they are both present, readers might find inconsistencies in their tone, meaning, or content.
Alongside the two languages, the Florentine Codex is punctuated with illustrations. The images in the codex include both decorations and compositions; many are painted in vivid color, while others are rendered only in ink outline, but all of them were illustrated by native artists over the course of years. In the 16th century, images were efficient and impactful ways of conveying information across linguistic and ideological barriers and became a common means of communicating messages in the early colonial world. Painted cloths, wall art, prints, banners, and other means of pictorial expression became tools for religious, political, and social communication, especially in the early days when only a few individuals could translate between Nahuatl and Spanish, much less the other languages spoken in Mesoamerica at the time. The images in the Florentine Codex represent an entirely separate mode of communication, and one with which both cultures would have been intimately familiar, though in different ways.
In the Nahuatl language, Indigenous painter-writers were known as tlacuiloque (singular tlacuilo), and were heirs to an artistic tradition that stretched back centuries before the European colonization of the Americas. Created by such skilled artisans, the images in the Florentine Codex are stylistic adaptations, integrating artistic elements from native traditions with the format and conventions of the European traditional styles, particularly the convention that favored formal isolation of subjects within the layout of the page. While the presentation of the images is generally more European in style, there are several examples of Aztec artistic conventions in the Florentine Codex. These include the use of curling symbols called "speech scrolls" to indicate a speaking individual in a static image, and the practice of depicting seashells on the edges of tendrils of water. Both of these stylistic elements appear in the image of Chalchiuhtlicue from the Codex Borbonicus, which was created by Aztec priests and preserves many pre-Hispanic modes of pictorial representation.
While the texts address audiences in the languages of two cultures, the images of the Florentine Codex represent the clearest examples of the cultural syncretism at play in 16th-century Mexico:
Such a work could have been produced only in Mesoamerica, where the introduction of the Roman alphabet and European art style made sense to people who had been writing and painting with ink and natural colors for centuries. It is among the rare first manuscripts to represent indigenous cultures that involved indigenous people.
(Peterson & Terraciano, 13)
⇒ Florentine Codex: An Encyclopedia of Life in 16th-Century Mexico
