De Tlacuilolli : Renaissance Artistic Theory in the Wake of the

Global Turn

Alessandra Russo

To what extent can or cannot art be conceived, practiced, and collected “nation-
ally” anymore? One decade after the publication of the first edition of Le Vite
de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani (The Lives ) in  by Gior-
gio Vasari, the Spanish art theorist, antiquarian, and collector Felipe de Guevara
discusses this question in his Comentarios de la pintura (Commentaries on Paint-
ing ) — written between  and , though it remained unpublished until the
end of the eighteenth century.1 The pages of the Comentarios are mostly recalled
for the numerous references to Flemish painters such as Jan van Eyck, Joachim
Patinir, Rogier van der Weyden, and especially Hieronymous Bosch — painters
that Guevera and his father, Diego, had extensively promoted. Diego owned the
famous Arnolfini Portrait by van Eyck, and Felipe was one of the major collectors
of Joachim Patinir’s land- and seascapes, paintings that would later end up in
Philip II’s own collection (fig. ).2 This artistic treaty, nonetheless, is a milestone
for reasons that go beyond the anecdotic presences of these painters.3
Dedicated to Philip II in the first years of his reign (Charles V had abdi-
cated in ) and written just before the construction of the Escorial had begun
(), the very content of the Comentarios has often been overlooked as a mim-
icking impulse of a non-Italian author to defend the Vasarian principles — such
as the “obbligo alla natura” (obligation to nature)4 — in the desolate panorama of
Spanish peninsular painting, a panorama that Guevara judges mercilessly. The
author has also been mocked for offering unusable recipes for artists and chimeri-
cal proposals, such as the invention of oil painting by the Greeks.5
But the Comentarios is in fact not only an artistic treaty. It is also a politi-
cal program. Felipe de Guevara writes as a kind of counselor to the King. He was
gentil-hombre de boca ( literally “gentleman of mouth”) of the royal court, which
is to say he took part in royal meals, religious processions, and other solemnities.
Hierarchically, he was close to the King. In the Comentarios , he diplomatically
addresses for Philip II a series of principles on which the ruler has to ground his
governance. The beginning and the end of the treaty are revelatory of this pro-
gram. The dedication to Philip II starts by recalling how Alexander the Great,
in the moments that he had “in excess” to his military occupations, spent time

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 De Tlacuilolli: Renaissance Artistic Theory in the Wake of the Global Turn 21

Fig. 1. Joachim Patinir (Flemish, c. 1480 –1524), Landscape with the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, 1520. Oil on
panel, 8 13/16 x 1113/16 in. (22.5 x 30 cm). Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam. On loan from The Netherlands
Cultural Agency Rijswik /Amersfoort

“with Apelles,” that is, both the painter and the art of painting , because “parecerle
poco un mundo para conquistar” (to conquer a world was not enough for him).
Passion for painting, and artistic patronage, are therefore presented as being in
excess to war; they are nonmilitary conquests that truly characterize and fulfill the
ruler. The dedication continues with other examples that confirm how even the
most avid conquerors kept an autonomous space that he calls the “aficción para
la pintura” (a fondness for painting) as the real inner conquest that distinguished
their grandeur.
Two hundred forty-seven pages later, in the second-to-last paragraph of
the final page of the Comentarios, Felipe de Guevara returns to the same idea. He
summons now the figure of the Barbarian, the Goth, and looks back to the dam-
ages they did invading and occupying the Roman provinces “como si de proposito
ovieran contra las buenas artes, y no contra los hombres, tomado a fuego y sangre
la conquista” (as if they had undertaken the conquest, with fire and blood, not
against men, but against the fine arts).6 The latter is one of numerous references
to Vasari who, in the Proemio of the first part of Le Vite, had been even more pre-

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 22 Alessandra Russo

cise about the aftermath of the Goths’ arrival. Speaking of the “ira di Totila” (the
rage of Totila), he stated that the destruction of artworks, during the conquest of
Rome, meant also the destruction of the very shape and being of art at large: “ab-
batté e destrusse talmente le statue, le pitture, i musaici e gli stucchi maravigiosi
che se ne perdé, non dico la maiestà sola, ma la forma e l’essere stesso.”7
There is a crucial difference, nonetheless, between evoking the memory
of Goths’ invasions from Florence, and doing so in writing from Madrid: it is the
fact that Felipe de Guevara is writing to Philip II not to Cosimo I de’ Medici. To
call into question the figure of the conqueror in a book dedicated to a king of an
empire such as the Spanish one, a king that will soon sign as the ruler of the “four
parts of the world”8 seems to be a memento, specular and complementary to the
one sketched in the very dedication: to limit the violence of the conquest, to avoid
destruction, to search for an inner conquest, that of the art of painting.
Another radical difference with the Italian art theorist is that, if for Va-
sari, after the darkness of the medieval times, Italian Renaissance started with
Cimabue, whereas for Felipe de Guevara, a Spanish painter that could be called is
yet to be born. The solution has, therefore, to be found outside the peninsula and
Guevara celebrates the fact that Philip II has resuscitated the art “having brought
and gathered together numerous people of good inventiveness and abilities, who
obliges the people native from Spain to study and work.”9 To bring in artists from
abroad and to collect their artworks displaying them “en lugares donde algunas
veces puedan ser vistas de muchos” (in places where sometimes they can be seen
by many people) is therefore the preferred solution to make art be finally born in
Spain.10 But to celebrate Philip II’s patronage seems, for Guevara, as important as
defining the best artistic training for any painter (not only Spanish) and expanding
the very theory of what the art of painting can be.

Nations and Mixtures

Between the dedication and the end of the treaty, Felipe de Guevara offers a pano-
ramic view of the different genres and techniques of the art of painting, based on
the principle that, for him, distinguishes what the art of painting is: neither the
disegno,11 nor the color, but the mezcla (mixture) of mediums so as to obtain a
naturalistic or “painterly” effect.12 The Guevarian mezcla , similar but not identi-
cal to the Vasarian unione nella pittura (union / blend in painting), enables him to
open the category of painting not only to oil painting or mural painting, but also
to glass or shell mosaics and other unexpected techniques.

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 De Tlacuilolli: Renaissance Artistic Theory in the Wake of the Global Turn 23

Guevara combines a more practical discussion on the principles of the

art of painting, with a political statement of what the art of painting can do to
the ruler (and vice versa) when he discusses the strong limits of national styles.
There are, he states, “national” characteristics — and here by nation, he means
“kingdom or extended province.”13 But these characteristics are due to the fact
that too often painters have been trained “nationally” and have not experienced
the world at large, with both its heterogeneous nature and the diverse ways to
represent it. Venetian painters, therefore, continue to copy a nationalistic, narrow
ideal of feminine beauty; German painters, he writes, continue to copy German
horses that are very different compared to the ones to be found in Spain, and so
on.14 These remarks on the limits of national styles are a crucial point to propose
also an outcome to the Spanish artistic situation.
Born in Brussels, Guevara did not travel much outside the peninsula
once he settled in Spain. But one trip gave him the occasion to visit different
territories and to observe their artistic productions: in , he took part in the
Spanish expedition of Tunis and we can see him on the battlefield in one of
the famous cartoons of the Battle of Tunis painted by the Flemish painter Jan
Cornelisz Vermeyen who, having also taken part to the expedition, portrays him
on his side.15 Guevara refers to this major episode of his life in the Comentarios ,
while recalling the journey made from North Africa back to Spain, via Spanish
Italy. In this long trip, he visits Sicily, Calabria, Naples, and Apulia. We read here
interesting remarks on the Byzantine mosaics of Monreale and of the church of
Saint Peter the Apostle (Palatine Chapel) in Palermo (fig. ). If, for Vasari, Byzan-
tine art was considered with a condescending air — made by those “remnants” of
the Greeks whose style was for him “old” but not “ancient”16— Guevara, on the
contrary, attentively observes the Palatine Chapel walls shining of “little pebbles
dyed with various colors” and brings his Spanish peers to visit this monument “as
a wonderful thing.”17
It is therefore a “transnational” or “international” training that Guevara
suggests for both painters and viewers. Far from the Vasarian project to construct
a “protonational” Italian art, he physically wanders the shores of the Mediterra-
nean in search both of “relics,” traces of ancient painting, and of a new, contem-
porary “transnational” definition of painting.
This is why his theoretical search needs to expand not only temporally
but spatially and well beyond the Mediterranean, actualizing the discussion on
the art of painting according to completely unexpected territories and repertories.

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 24 Alessandra Russo

Fig. 2. Palatine Chapel in the Royal Palace of Palermo, built c. 1140

After the pages devoted to the mosaics found in Spanish Italy, in fact,
Guevara takes the most definitive distance from Vasari in the section devoted to,
“On the Paintings of the Egyptians,” addressing the art of painting in the New
World, specifically in New Spain. While discussing the hieroglyphs of the Egyp-
tians — via the Hieroglyphica of Horus Apollo — Guevara looks to the Mesoameri-
can pictography (called, in Nahuatl, tlacuilolli 18 ):

This sort of painting and the fact of expressing their concept through
painting has been seemingly been imitated by the Western Indians,
and of the new world, especially those of New Spain; having pos-
sibly received this practice from the Egyptians in ancient times, which
could have happened, or on the contrary having the people of these
two nations [ Egyptians and Western Indians] having shared the same
imaginations.19

Discussing the art of “Western Indian painting” within a “transnational”

discussion of the art of painting tout court , Guevara does not simply refer to the
Pre-Hispanic painted manuscripts, but to those produced after the conquest, and
more precisely to the paintings which depict the Spanish conquest itself: “They
figure in painting the Expeditions that the vassals of your Majesty and themselves
made in the conquest of Mexico and other parts.”20 Felipe de Guevara seems

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 De Tlacuilolli: Renaissance Artistic Theory in the Wake of the Global Turn 25

to speak of one of the numer-

ous postconquest Tlaxcalteca
manuscripts — such as a copy
of the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, a
canvas painted around 
in New Spain within the tra-
dition of the tlacuilolli , but
representing the conquest
of Mexico from the vantage
point of the indigenous allies
of the Spaniards, the Tlax-
calteca (fig. ).21 An embassy
of nobles from Tlaxcala had
travelled to Spain  (and
another in ) with one of
these copies,22 and it is very
probable that Felipe de Gue-
Fig. 3. The final battle between the Mexicans and the Spaniards with their Allies,
19th century copy of a 16th century canvas (from the facsimile published in 1892) vara, being close to the King,
met them personally. In his
Comentarios , he therefore al-
ready speaks of a postconquest form of “Indian” painting, combining not only
different styles and subjects, but also different technical mixtures: pigments and
paper, or cotton canvases coming from Europe, with local colors, etc. And here it
is interesting, in fact, to juxtapose a detail of the Lienzo with the Battle of Tunis
cartoons by Vermeyen, which were completed just a few years before (fig. ).23
To describe these “Western Indian” paintings in a book dedicated to
Philip II had a specific actuality at the Spanish court when Guevara was complet-
ing the treaty. On July , , the Spanish Franciscan Diego de Landa held the
famous “unprecedented and unparalleled auto da fe ” in Mani, Yucatán, ordering
the burning of , statues and forty Mayan pictographic manuscripts written
on amate paper and deer hide.24 The dates coincide with Guevara’s Comentarios,
and we can make the plausible hypothesis that while talking about the “barbarian”
auto da fe of books, at the end of the treaty, he was in fact recalling the Yucatecan
one.25 This reference should have been ghostly to any reader of the time, in pri-
mis to Philip II, who already in these years was dealing with accusations against
De Landa made by the first bishop of the Yucatán himself, Fray Francisco Toral.

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 26 Alessandra Russo

Fig. 4. Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen (Dutch, 1500 –1559), Battle of Tunis, c. 1546 –50. Watercolor on paper, 151 1/2 x 260 5/8
in. (385 x 662 cm). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Upon his arrival to the region in , Toral had immediately denounced the
Franciscan’s unacceptable behavior to the King. In this light, the final reference to
the destruction of libraries by the Goths, in the Comentarios ,26 should be read as
also a reference to the ongoing destructions within the very Spanish empire, hence
the need to limit the violence of conquest and oppose to it a nonmilitary interest
in the “expansion” of the category of painting.
Along with the criticism toward a pure national style, the appreciation of
Byzantine aesthetics, and the inclusion of the art of Egyptian and Mesoamerican
“hieroglyphs” (both pre- and postconquest), the other major “expansion” of the
Vasarian canon, appears in the Comentarios when Guevara points to another New
Spain form of “painting” most appreciated in European courts, and especially by
Philip II— namely, “feather painting” (fig. ):

It is right to recognize that the Indians have brought something ex-

tremely new and very rare to the art of painting, as it is the painting
with feathers of the birds, varying dresses, colors of the skin, and similar
things, with the diversity of feather colors, that nature raises there, and
they with their industry select, divide, take apart and mix.27

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 De Tlacuilolli: Renaissance Artistic Theory in the Wake of the Global Turn 27

Fig. 5. Saint John the Evangelist, 17th century. Feather mosaic and paper on copper, 14 3/8 x 10 1/8 in. (36.5 x 25.8 cm)
with frame. Collection Daniel Liebsohn

Here as well, it is the category of mixture (which has nothing to do with

the idea of hybridization, but points to the physical combination of materials so
as to obtain a natural effect) that enables Guevara to break even further from the
Vasarian canon and to propose what we can start envisioning as an Iberian theory
of painting.

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 28 Alessandra Russo

Antiquity Theory in Francisco de Holanda: a Matter of Sowing

A decade before Felipe de Guevara, and in fact two years before the publication
of the first edition of Vasari’s Vite , another Iberian author wrote an artistic treaty
from the vantage point of the Iberian expansion, and yet in excess with a simple
celebration of the expansion projects of Portugal and Spain.
In , Francisco de Holanda, the Portuguese painter, illuminator, ar-
chitect, and essayist author of one of the most important treatises on the arts of
the Renaissance dedicates an entire chapter of Da pintura antigua (On Ancient
Painting ) to a strange matter. The title of the chapter reads: “Como os preceitos
da pintura antigoa forao por todo o mundo” (How the Principles of the Ancient
Painting Spread All Over the World).
Before reading some excerpts from this intriguing chapter, one must
remember that the Da pintura antigua is a key document about the humanist
theory — and specifically of the Neoplatonic theory — on the artistic practices, but
that its author is also a firsthand source on Michelangelo’s ideas on painting. In
fact, in the second part of the book, Francisco de Holanda stages a dialogue with
the Italian artist who speaks in first person about his aesthetic convictions. But
before the lively and dialogic mise-en-scène of the great master, Francisco de Hol-
anda nestles what can appear to be a quite enigmatic lucubration:

How the Principles of the Ancient Painting Spread All Over the world:
What I see in the past that I feel worth reminding, and that I would
not believe if I had not experienced it, is that those same principles
that the ancient masters did consider the right ones, and had approved
in the art of painting and sculpting, those same principles have been
spread between the human beings, so they fill now the entire world.

It is a true “diasporic” theory of the art of painting in the original meaning of di-
aspora (diasporein : to spread or to sow across); its principles have been scattered all
over the globe like seeds, living forms that have taken new roots and new paths.28
Yet their common origins can be recognizable. The end of the chapters insists once
more on this organic vision:

But going back to our purpose, they told me that even in Africa and in
Morocco there are some eagle sculptures and carvings of the Romans.
In India their pagodas, even though not well proportioned, are done

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 De Tlacuilolli: Renaissance Artistic Theory in the Wake of the Global Turn 29

after the ancient discipline, and the same for the things of China. This
for what concerns Levant and Asia, what shall I say now more? That
antiquity exhales in its essence everywhere, but what is even more
striking is that even in the new world where barbarous people live, in
Brazil and Peru, which so far have been unknown to humanity, even
these people in many vessels of gold that I have seen, and in their
figures they had the same reason and discipline of the Ancient; and in
this evidence there is no secondary argument that those people have
been in another time civilized, and that the principles of ancient paint-
ings have already been sown all over the world up to the antipode.

This incredible statement needs to be understood within the structure

of the treaty.29 Having first clarified what he means by “ancient,” explaining that
ancient and “old” are not synonyms at all and having introduced the readers to
the idea of Prisca Pictura (Painting of the Origins ), Francisco de Holanda had
mercilessly judged the Portuguese school, whose only painter to be considered
worthy of memory (merece memoria ) is, for him, Nuño Gonçalves and his Saint
Vincent Panels (fig. ). The writer will then designate the principles of the an-
cient painting (such as invention, physiognomy, ornamentation, etc.). But before
naming these principles, and just after that “national” judgment (in short, that
Portugal practically has no painter) the Portuguese writer opens up the lens of his
appreciation to territories directly touched by the Portuguese or by the Spanish

Fig. 6. Nuño Gonçalves (Portugese, active 1450 –91), Saint Vincent Panels, c. 1465. Tempera and possibly oil on panel, 201 1/2 x
488 1/8 in. (512 x 1240 cm). Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon

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 30 Alessandra Russo

expansion throughout the world:

Africa, Morocco, India, China,
Brazil, and Peru. He mentions
for instance some intriguing vasos
de oro that could very probably
be the famous golden aquillas
(fig. ). As in the case of the “In-
dian” painted books mentioned
by Guevara, which in fact were
already made after the conquest,
these golden vessels, the aquillas,
were still produced in the Andes
after the arrival of the Spaniards.
Still in , seven pairs of silver
aquillas with decorations such as
the European lion motifs were
part of the Atocha Galleon that
arrived on the coast of Florida.30
They also incorporated other mo-
tifs, such as the Basilisk, which in
fact could even have originated in
Fig. 7. Aquilla (cup), Peru, c. 850–1050. Gold, 5 3/8 x 4 1/8 in. (13.7 x 10.5 cm). Horus Apollo’s Hyeroglyphica.
Worcester Museum of Art, Museum Purchase (1962.36) What interests us is that
within this canonical treaty on the
arts of the Renaissance, the author includes a chapter that is at the same time
a perfect example of his Neoplatonic vision of the artistic activity, but also an
incredible enrichment of this Neoplatonic theory itself.31 In fact, the author has
defined the ancient painting, as pintura prisca, where prisca, within a Ficinian
vocabulary, means “of the origins,” of divine origins, universal in space and time;
something that had been known and was then forgotten, and that needed to be
rediscovered in order to become new. In this sense, the relationships between
Ancient and New are strictly intertwined, and this is why the New Worlds play a
key role in the argumentation of Francisco de Holanda. In another masterwork,
De aetatibus mundi imagines (Images of the Ages of the World ), Holanda depicts
the fourth day of Creation in which the world includes also America (fig. ). This
image is a perfect illustration of what Sylvie Deswarte-Rosa, the authority in the

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 De Tlacuilolli: Renaissance Artistic Theory in the Wake of the Global Turn 31

Fig. 8. Francisco de Holanda (Portugese, 1517–1584), The Fourth Day of Creation, from De aetatibus mundi imagines
(1545 –73). Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España (Dib /014 / 026 f. 6r)

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 32 Alessandra Russo

study of Francisco de Hollanda, has called the fusion of the classic antiquity and
the new idea of the world.32 In this sense, antiquity is paradoxically the category
Holanda uses to see the New Worlds, and the novelty of these spaces is in an
equally paradoxical situation, which enables the concept of antiquity to be newly
found and “fixed” up to the antipodes.

Iberian Expansion and Literatures of Art

This same effort to describe and think about new artistic productions happens,
let’s say, on a global scale, in all the territories of the Iberian expansion. While
Guevara, from Spain, and Holanda, from Portugal, think about how, theoreti-
cally, to expand the theory of painting taking into account the new territories
of the Iberian expansion, other authors (missionaries, travelers, conquistadors,
soldiers, etc.) in New Spain, Peru, Brazil, but also in Goa, and soon in Japan, the
Philippines or China, are confronted not only with the novelty of objects, monu-
ments, and things, but also very concretely with their terminologies. Guevara bor-
rows the term “hieroglyphs” to in fact speak of the art of tlacuilolli, whose literal
translation would be “the act of putting something on a surface” (and defines the
art of “painting” as the positioning of contents onto a plane surface— quite similar
to the idea of historia , in Alberti).33 He also refers to the art of feather painting,
while the Náhuatl term was amantecayotl , whose precise etymology would bring
us to the original mythical space that these artists occupied within the city of
Tenochtitlan, namely Amantlan.34 As for Holanda, he refers to Brazilian and
Peruvian vasos de oro that were very probably aquillas . These terms were already
circulating in inventories, in other written texts ( letters, chronicles, etc.) but also
in dictionaries. Let us recall the case of the Náhuatl dictionary published by the
Franciscan Alonso de Molina in Mexico in , where the words tlacuilolli and
amantecayotl appear, along with other intriguing terms that designate, for in-
stance, “representation.”
Nonetheless, painting or antiquity , mixture , or sowing are terms as rich as
tlacuilolli, amantecayotl , or aquilla . And it is because painting , antiquity , mixture,
or sowing are terms that are transformed by these new objects. To speak of an
aquilla in terms of the art of painting is to expand this concept, to urge the idea
of painting (and diseño [drawing ], according to Holanda’s meaning of painting)
to think about the novelty of these items. And on the contrary, to speak about
feather painting where Náhuatl says amantecayotl or to say painting where Náhuatl
would say tlacuilolli does not simply impose old terms on new things. Guevara

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 De Tlacuilolli: Renaissance Artistic Theory in the Wake of the Global Turn 33

clearly states it: “Indians have brought something new to the art of painting,”
that is, feather painting. On the other hand, the combination of these terms (for
instance, the term pintura de plumas , [feather painting]) speaks to the transforma-
tion of the objects and techniques themselves: after the conquest the very aesthetic
effect of amantecayotl changed in the direction of (oil) painting, to become more
pictorial — hence, the term “feather painting.”

Artistic Theory in the Wake of the Global Turn

Aesthetic categories such as tlacuilolli , amantecayotl , but also pintura (Guevara) or
antigüedad (Holanda) are therefore reborn or rewritten in the context of the Ibe-
rian expansion. The point here is that these texts, which I consider another kind
of artistic treatises of the Renaissance, put the Vasarian canon or the Albertian
principles “under pressure,” while at the same time dialoguing with them. It is
therefore not an artistic theory written from “the periphery” and mimicking the
canonic one. These texts transform early modern artistic theory.
Another important element to stress is the fact that this artistic theory
doesn’t nestle only in texts entitled Comentarios de la pintura or in the Da pintura
antiga , but in a panoply of distinct genres. For instance, let’s recall the Letters of
Cortés. Before the final war of conquest on Tenochtitlan, the conquistador has
splendid pages on the architecture of the city, on its urban plan with its streets and
bridges, or on its monuments’ materials. It is fascinating to see how the conquis-
tador needs to make a considerable effort to intertwine the category of idolatry
or the term mezquita (mosque) with the very monuments that he is observing.
The result is sometimes paradoxical, for us, as when he writes, “hay en esta gran
ciudad muchas mezquitas o casas de sus ídolos de muy hermosos edificios” (there
are in this city, numerous mosques and houses of their idols, which are wonder-
ful constructions).35 As for Diego de Landa, the Franciscan friar responsible for
the auto da fe of Mayan “books” in the Yucatan, a few years later he will be the
same one to try to understand that very Maya writing system, in his Relación de
las cosas de Yucatán (), recalling, “We found a great number of books written
in their letters, and because they did not have anything else than superstition and
falsity of Evil, we burned them all.”36 The following pages, in Landa’s Relación,
are nonetheless devoted to the beauty of Mayan architecture. He even attempted
to sketch the edifices of Izamal and T’ho, adding with his own handwriting the
word “beautiful” several times: “patio hermosísimo” (very beautiful patio), “plaça
muy grande y hermosa” (very big and beautiful square) (figs.  and ).37

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 34 Alessandra Russo

Fig. 9. Diego de Landa (Spanish, 1524 –1579), sketch of Mayan architecture, in Relación de
las cosas de Yucatán (1560; 17th century edition). Biblioteca Real Academia de la Historia,
Madrid ( 9 / 5153 f. 46v)

Fig. 10. Diego de Landa, sketch of Mayan architecture, in Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (1560; 17th century edition).
Biblioteca Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid ( 9 / 5153 f. 47r)

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 De Tlacuilolli: Renaissance Artistic Theory in the Wake of the Global Turn 35

We are therefore in front of a contradiction: one could state that the use
of categories such as painting, antiquity, or idolatry speak more of an expansionist
artistic theory that covers all. Let’s recall the letter sent by Philip II to the Chinese
Emperor Wanli in , in which he refers to the variety of artifacts that he offers
him (artifacts that encompassed everything from oil paintings by Alonso Sánchez
Coelho to feather paintings from New Spain) as “cosas que hay y se usan en
nuestros reynos” (things that exist and that are used in our kingdoms).38
The price of an Iberian artistic theory, in the fifteenth century, is therefore
apparently an all-embracing and homogenizing lens that transforms the panoply
of artifacts encountered into things of “our kingdoms”; but on the other hand,
these sources also speaks of new ways to look at and to describe these things in
their process of becoming “ours.”
On the other side, there is another paradox: Holanda and Guevara are
also the makers of a very negative vision of the arts of Portugal and Spain. For
this reason, the novelty of their own theory has been misunderstood, and they
have been overlooked as Italianists and classicists. The novelty of their points of
view is that they give Iberian Arts the chance to be among the greatest “spaces” of
artistic invention, through the inclusion of sites where the crowns of Portugal and
Spain are expanding their dominion. On the other side, this “artistic theory” has
remained absolutely marginal, for different reasons. In the case of Holanda and
Guevara, their judgment of Spanish and Portuguese art has paradoxically trapped
them in their own game, excluding them from the canon of the art theory. As for
the writings of conquistadors, and missionaries, these thousands of pages of de-
scriptions of monuments and objects have been reduced to the projection of Old
World categories, while there is much more. There is, at least, something that we
are urged to think about: the complex relationship between art and expansion.
The artistic theorization of these authors is written from the vantage point of the
process of Christianization, colonization, and globalization. Still, something ex-
ceeds this political context, and we cannot reduce the writing of an artistic theory
as homogenous with the process of expansion. It is a theory that has at its core the
dangerous relationship between art and conquest, and art and war, but it is also a
theory that needs to put aside the conquest to create an autonomous space. These
texts, therefore, become a paradoxical place where art is given a space for think-
ing, sometimes just before, and sometimes just after the destruction. Or against it.

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 36 Alessandra Russo

. Felipe de Guevara, Comentarios de la pintura que escribió Don Felipe de Guevara, Gentil-hombre
de boca del Señor Emperador Carlos Quinto, Rey de España. Se publican por la primera vez con un
discurso preliminar y algunas notas de Don Antonio Ponz (Madrid: Don Geronimo Ortega, );
Guevara’s original manuscript (composed c. –) has been lost and Antonio Ponz’s edition was
in fact based on an eighteenth-century manuscript (today in the library of the Museo del Prado and
accessible online). It is therefore crucial to acknowledge the possible presence of later interpolations.
For Guevara, see the works of Elena Vazquez Dueñas, especially “Los Comentarios de la Pintura de
Felipe de Guevara,” in “Nuevas investagaciones en Historia del Arte,” special issue, Anales de Historia
del Arte (): –, which provides a good bibliography.
. See the documentation published in the exhibition catalogue Patinir: Essays and Critical Catalogue
(Madrid: Museo del Prado, ).
. Julius von Schlosser makes only a furtive reference on page  to the Comentarios in his
Kunstliteratur (Vienna: Schroll, ), characterizing Guevara’s work as “die merkwürdige Geschichte
der antike Malerei” (the strange history of ancient painting).
. Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, da Cimabue insino a
tempi nostri (; Torino: Einaudi, ), . Translation by author. This opening passage of the
life of Giotto is highly rhetorical, since it in fact states that one has to have the same obligation to
Giotto that the painters have to nature (“quello stesso obbligo che hanno gli artefici pittori alla natura
[ . . . ], il medesimo si deve avere a Giotto”). On the “obligation to nature” in Vasari, see Georges
Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the End of a Certain Art History (Philadelphia:
Pennsylvania State University Press, ), .
. Guevara, Comentarios , : “Yo persuadido me tengo, que los antiguos pintaron sus tablas al óleo,
ó con una grasa semejante tan fixa como el óleo” (I am persuaded that the ancients painted their
panels with oil, or with a grease similar to oil).
. Ibid., 
. Vasari, “Proemio,” in Le Vite , .
. Serge Gruzinski, Les quatre parties du monde: Histoire d’une mondialisation (Paris: Éditions de la
Martinière, ).
. Guevara, Comentarios , : “[Esta arte] habiendo ya tantos siglos dormido en Italia, la despertaron
Raphael de Urbino y Michael Angelo. En Flandes Rugier y Joannes y Joaquin Patimier [sic]. En
nuestra España, donde nunca en los tiempos pasados debió de estar en asiento V. M., entre las buenas
artes que resucita, la favorece tanto, habiendo traido y juntado de diversas naciones una masa de
buenos ingenios y habilidades, que obliga a los naturales de España á estudiar y trabajar tanto, que
acabados éstos merezcan ellos suceder en sus lugares y ocupar sus plazas.”
. Ibid., .

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 De Tlacuilolli: Renaissance Artistic Theory in the Wake of the Global Turn 37

. For a philosophical perspective on the Renaissance category of “disegno,” see Jean-Louis Déotte,
“Alberti, Vasari, Leonardo, from disegno as drawing to disegno as projective milieu,” Revue Appareil
(January ): http://revues.mshparisnord.org /appareil /index.php?id=.
. Vasari also speaks on how “la unione nella pittura é una discordanza di colori diversi accordati
insieme.” See Vasari, “Introduzione ‘De la pittura,’” in Le Vite , .
. Miguel de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (Madrid: Luis Sánchez, ), .
. Guevara, Comentarios , –.
. Hendrik J. Horn, Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen. Painter of Charles V and his Conquest of Tunis.
Paintings. Etchings. Drawings. Cartoons & Tapestries (Doornspijk, The Netherlands: Davaco, ),
fig. A. See also Der Kriegszug Kaiser Karls V. gegen Tunis (Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum;
Milan: Skira, ).
. For the distinction Vasari makes between old and ancient (vecchi e non antichi ) Greeks, see
the “Proemio” in Le Vite , : “da San Silvestro in qua furono poste in opera da un certo residuo
de’ Greci, i quali piú tosto tignere che dipingere sapevano.” See also Vasari’s comment that
“abbandonando le maniere vecchie, ritornarono a imitare le antiche” (“Proemio” in Le Vite , ).
. Guevara, Comentarios , : “Célebres son las paredes de la Iglesia de Monreal en Sicilia, así en
abundancia como en arte; pero creo que á todo lo que de la antigüedad ha sobrado, vence lo que hay
en Palermo en una Iglesia del Castillo viejo, llamado San Pedro el Viejo, lo qual yo miré con gran
atención el año de  viniendo de la jornada de Tunez, adonde llevé a algunos de la nación á verlo,
como cosa maravillosa.”
. The bibliography on the Mesoamerican art of pictography is extensive. We will recall here the
book by Karl Anton Nowotny, Tlacuilolli: Style and Contents of the Mexican Pictorial Manuscripts
(Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, ). See also, in particular, the work of Elizabeth
Hill Boone and, for postconquest pictography, Donald Robertson. More recently, see Dana
Leibsohn, Script and Glyph: Prehispanic History, Colonial Bookmaking and the Historia Tolteca-
Chichimeca (Washington, DC: Dumberton Oaks, ).
. Guevara, Comentarios , –: “Esta suerte de Pintura y el declarar por ella sus conceptos, parece
haber imitado los Indios occidentales, y del nuevo orbe, especialmente los de la nueva España: ahora
sea que por antigua tradición les venga de los Egipcios, lo qual podría haber sido, hora sea que los
naturales de estas dos naciones concurriesen en unas mismas imaginaciones.”
. Ibid., : “Tienen figuradas en pintura las Jornadas que los vasallos de vuestra V.M. y ellos
hicieron en la conquista de México y otras partes.” On the codex mentioned by Guevara, see the
pioneer article by Manuel Romero de Terreros, “Cosas que fueron. Don Felipe de Guevara y el Arte
de los Antiguos Mexicanos,” Excélsior (March , ).
. The Lienzo de Tlaxcala is today lost (a facsimile of a late nineteenth-century copy was published

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 38 Alessandra Russo

by Alfredo Chavero in ). Copies of the Lienzo were circulating in the sixteenth century. There
is a version of the Lienzo in the Casa de Colón of Valladolid today considered by several scholars
a nineteenth-century copy. See Manuel Ballesteros Gaibrois, “El Lienzo de Tlaxcala de la Casa de
Colón de Valladolid” in Cuadernos Prehispánicos, (): –.
. A document from the cabildo of Tlaxcala states in  that “A painting of Cortés Arrival in
Tlaxcala and the war of conquest is to be prepared for presentation to the emperor,” quoted by
Florine G. L. Asselbergs, “The Conquest in Images: Stories of Tlaxcalteca and Quauhquecholteca
Conquistadors,” in Laura E. Matthew and Michael R. Oudijk, Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous
Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, ), –,
. See also the work of Travis Barton Kranz.
. An association between Tlaxcala’s conquest narratives and Vermayden’s Battle of Tunis had also
been made by Asselbergs, who points to the presence in the Real Alcázar of Sevilla of a tapestry made
after the cartoons; see Asselbergs, “The Conquest in Images,” –.
. John Chuchiak, “In Servitio Dei : Fray Diego de Landa, the Franciscan Order, and the Return
of the Extirpation of Idolatry in the Colonial Diocese of Yucatán, –,” in The Americas ,
no.  (): –, .
. It could be worth investigating the possible familial relationship between one of De Landa’s peers
in the Yucatán, Hernando de Guevara, and Felipe de Guevara. Hernando de Guevara signs with
de Landa a document to the Council of the Indies supporting several appointments in the Yucatán
(e.g., that of Lorenzo de Bienvenida as the first bishop) and urging a bolder presence of Yucatán
functionaries in the Audiencia of New Spain, as well as defining the Franciscan privileges in the
Christianization process. See “Fr. Diego de Landa, Fr. Francisco de Navarro y Fr. Hernando de
Guevara al Consejo de Indias,  abril ,” in Documentos para la historia de Yucatán , Primera serie,
–. Edited by France V. Scholes (Mérida: Compañía Tipográfica Yucateca, ): –.
. Guevara, Comentarios, : “Todo esto debemos á esos bárbaros de Godos, los quales ocupando
las provincias llenas entónces de todas las buenas artes, no se contenaron solo con arruinar los
edificios, estatuas, y semejantes cosas, pero tambien se ocuparon con sumo cuidado en quemar
librerias insignes, no dexando papel á vida como si de propósito ovieran contra las buenos artes, y no
contra los hombres, tomado á fuego y sangre la conquista.”
. Ibid., : “Justo es tambien es concederles haber traído á la Pintura algo de nuevo y raro,
como es la pintura de las plumas de las aves, variando ropas, encarnaciones y cosas semejantes, con
diversidad de colores de plumas que por allá cría la naturaleza, y ellos con su industria escogen,
dividen, apartan y mezclan.” See also Alessandra Russo, “A Contemporary Art from New Spain,”
in Images Take Flight. Feather Art in Mexico and Europe , ed. Alessandra Russo, Gerhard Wolf, and
Diana Fane (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, forthcoming).

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 De Tlacuilolli: Renaissance Artistic Theory in the Wake of the Global Turn 39

. Kozikoski Valereto points yet to the “rather selective fashion” of this dispersion. Deneb Kozikoski
Valereto, “Mundializing Holanda’s Neo-Platonism” (Graduate seminar final paper, Columbia
University, Fall ), .
. The first scholar having studied this chapter of the Da pintura antiga in the context both of
Portuguese expansion projects and of Neoplatonic philosophy has been Sylvie Deswarte-Rosa in
Ideias e imagens em Portugal na época dos descobrimentos: Francisco de Holanda e a teoria da arte
(Lisbon: DIFEL, ).
. On the presence of the term aquillas in the vocabularies and on the aquillas produced in the
post-conquest period, see Tom Cummins, Toasts with the Inca: Andean Abstraction and Colonial
Images on Quero Vessels (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), –. For those found
in the Atocha galleon, see –.
. Using Gruzinski’s definition of “mondialisation” (in Les quatre parties du monde ), Kozikoski
Valereto in “Mundalializing Holanda’s Neo-Platonism,” 8, has recently criticized Deswarte-Rosa’s
interpretation to state that Holanda’s Neoplatonism was not only applied to but also transformed
by the emergence of the objects of the New World.
. Deswarte-Rosa, Ideias e imagens.
. Leon Battista Alberti, De pictura ();
4 On the debate on the proper translation of the Albertian
term historia, see Antony Grafton, “Historia and Istoria: Alberti’s Terminology in Context,” I Tatti
Studies: Essays in the Renaissance  (): –; I refer here to the reflexion of Thomas Golsenne
and Bertrand Prévost in the glossary to their translation to French of La peinture (Paris: Seuil, ),
: “Il est claire que l’historia désigne ici non seulement ce qui est peint, mais encore la surface
picturale elle-même, l’étendue de la peinture.”
. Alessandra Russo, The Untranslatable Image: A Mestizo History of Art of New Spain,  –
(Austin: University of Texas Press, forthcoming), chapter .
. Hernán Cortés, Letters from Mexico , trans. Anthony Pagden (London and New Haven: Yale
University Press, ).
. Diego de Landa, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (Mexico City: Porrúa, ), –.
. On Landa’s description of Mayan sites, see recently William Hanks, Converting Words (Berkeley:
University of California Press, ), .
. Transcribed by Carmen Hsu in “Dos cartas de Felipe II al emperador de China,” eHumanista
(): –, : “C[on] la voluntad que os inuío algunas cosas de las que ay y se vsan en estos
nuestros rey[n]os.”

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