ELLEN T. BAIRD: Parts of the Body: Order and Disorder in the “Codex Florentino”
UIC Art History Colloquium
September 27, 2019
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
Chapter 27 (“Parts of the Body”) of Book 10 of the Mexican Florentine Codex (1575-77; Bernardino de Sahagún and indigenous collaborators) is anomalous in that the two parallel alphabetic texts are very different. The Spanish (left column) addresses sixteenth-century Franciscan missionary history in Mexico (the “Relación”). The Nahuatl (right column) is an extensive lexicon of body parts. Six drawings of body parts (the pictorial text) are placed in the Spanish column, adjacent to the Nahuatl word that names the body part. The drawings exist in the space between the two alphabetic texts, both literally and figuratively, and speak to the artists’ autonomous authority.
This study analyzes the three texts (Spanish, Nahuatl, and pictorial) and their relationships to one another relative to the theme of the body considered from several new perspectives: the abstract lexical body, the corporeal indigenous body, conversion, social organization, and disease.
Ellen T. Baird is professor emerita of art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of The Drawings of Sahagun’s “Primeros Memoriales”: Structure and Style (University of Oklahoma Press, 1992). Her many publications on the Sahaguntine corpus consider the implications of gridded space, the representation of history, the transformation of the pictorial text, as well as the identity of the indigenous artists. With Cristián Roa-de-la Carrera, she co-curated the 2016 exhibition The Aztecs and the Making of Colonial Mexico (Newberry Library, Chicago).
Date posted
Aug 30, 2019
Date updated
Sep 15, 2019