Portraying the Aztec Past

Angela Herren Rajagopalan is an associate professor of art history at the University of North Carolina.

Beyond offering insights into the authorship, contents, and intended audience of the three codices, we are made to appreciate the evolving indigenous response to outsider influences as well as the interethnic jockeying evident as they protected their prerogatives and legacies within a new colonial order. It is this broader window onto the cultural context that makes [Portraying the Aztec Past] a valuable resource for both lay readers and scholars interested in Latin American studies, including anthropologists, historians, and art historians, as well as students of manuscript and book cultures. (H-Net Reviews, Latin America) Portraying the Aztec Past is an important work about the production of history. Rajagopalan shows how the dynamics of identity, both individual and corporate, shaped that production in the context of the formation of not one but two imperial worlds and their artistic, literary, historical, and cosmological frameworks. (History: Reviews of New Books) [Portraying the Aztec Past exemplifies] the kind of rigorous scholarship that is driving the study of colonial indigenous documents toward a wider synthesis...[A] marvelous study, which should well serve as a model for much-needed comparative scholarship of Mesoamerican codices. (Colonial Latin American Review) [Portraying the Aztec Past] provides a very clear and convincing interpretation of three very closely connected pictorial manuscripts and presents an outstanding contribution to the study of indigenous pictorial manuscripts of colonial Mexico. (The Historian) Rajagopalan’s book is an excellent contribution to Mesoamerican manuscript studies and a compelling read for specialists and a more general audience alike. It is particularly notable for the focus on the materiality of the manuscripts, the artist and intended audience, and the social and political machinations that prompted their creation. (Ethnohistory) Rajagopalan has written a work full of telling examples, helping the specialist or the student with abundant information that could easily escape even the trained eye. (Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture) The value of this work, especially to historians working on the Spanish colonial Southwest, is in its understanding of the production and function of manuscripts. (SMRC Revista) [Portraying the Aztec Past] is built on extensive and well-established scholarship. [Rajagopalan] carefully examines the intertextuality or possible dependencies between the three pictorial manuscripts—each created in different moments of time—exploring when their narratives converge, how and why they diverge, as well as the ways in which their stories intersect with purely textual historical accounts. Her book also sheds light on the material aspects of these manuscripts, the identity of their Native authors, and their strategies or motivations. (Latin American Research Review)

• List of Illustrations and TablesAcknowledgmentsChapter 1. Introduction: Portraying the Aztec PastChapter 2. Codex Boturini: A Pictographic ParadigmChapter 3. Master and Apprentice: The Multiple Artistic Hands in Codex AzcatitlanChapter 4. Don MartÍn Ecatzin: Codex Azcatitlan’s Cosmic HeroChapter 5. Traitors, Intrigue, and the Cosmic Cycle in Codex AzcatitlanChapter 6. Codex Aubin and the Influence of Printed BooksChapter 7. Conclusion: Central Mexican Manuscript Painting in TransitionEpilogue. Life after ProductionAppendix 1. Translation of the Nahuatl Glosses in Codex AzcatitlanAppendix 2. Translation of the Nahuatl Text in Codex AubinNotesBibliographyIndex