Object, Image, Cleverness - The

Object, Image, Cleverness:
The Lienzo de Tlaxcala

Byron Ellsworth Hamann
Absence
This essay is about an object that no longer exists. The Lienzo de Tlaxcala was a painted
cotton cloth, 2 metres wide and 5 metres long. Created in the Central Mexican town
of Tlaxcala around 1552, its surface was covered with dozens of complex scenes
arranged in a seven by thirteen grid. Together, these vignettes (most headed with
a brief alphabetic caption in Nahuatl) told how the Aztec empire was overthrown
by the forces of a joint indigenous-European army. The authors of the Lienzo, the
Tlaxcalans, had been enemies of the Aztecs since prehispanic times, and so when
Hernán Cortés and his soldiers reached Tlaxcala in August 1519, a military alliance
was quickly formed. The Lienzo, in other words, was an account of the ‘Conquest of
Mexico’ from a Native American point of view. Unfortunately, the physical cloth
is now lost. It disappeared during the French invasion of Mexico in the 1860s. But
before it vanished, tracings were made of its imagery. These were used to print a set
of fragmented lithographs in 1892.1 From these lithographs (the tracings themselves
are now lost) I have digitally reconstructed the visual form of the original document
(see Parergon, plate 1).2 Paradoxically, even though this object no longer exists, its
reconstruction provides us with an extremely rich touchstone – as it were – for
thinking about issues of materiality, iconography, cleverness, and the structures of
Native American history-writing.
Image/Object
Studies of material culture often take one of two forms. Analysis of the physical
materiality of objects is, unfortunately, frequently separated from analysis of the
iconographic meanings inscribed on their surfaces.3 This separation of materiality
from iconography is problematic, and a number of recent studies have attempted to
join these two approaches. Anthropologist Alfred Gell is not alone in his reservations
about the ‘iconographic approach … which treats art as a species of writing, and
which fails, equally, to take into consideration the presented object rather than the
represented symbolic meanings.’4 Michael Cole’s studies of Renaissance bronzes and
goldwork, for example, explore the meanings of metals in early modern Europe,
Detail from Gesso and and the ways those meanings (and the skills needed to manipulate molten ores)
Deerskin (plate 4).
can help illuminate the messages conveyed by cast statuary.5 Along similar lines,
DOI: Jennifer Roberts has explored artworks created to travel, showing how the surface
10.1111/1467-8365.12017 iconography of such portable artefacts often includes conscious reflections on their
Art History | ISSN 0141-6790
36 | 3 | June 2013 | pages 518-545 physical mobility.6 Expanding this tradition, my own essay on cleverness and the
© Association of Art Historians 2013 519

Object, Image, Cleverness
1 Parergon.
Lienzo de Tlaxcala investigates the complicated interplay of iconography and materiality

in the early modern transatlantic world.
Digital/Physical
On one level, the Lienzo’s digital reconstruction allows us to understand a great deal
about its iconographic meanings. Many of these have been hidden ever since the
individual scenes of the Lienzo were reproduced as fragmented vignettes in 1892. At
the same time, this insubstantial digital reconstruction also allows us to understand
a great deal about the material symbolism once evoked by the Lienzo as a physical
thing. The original Lienzo (as I argue below) was an object in dialogue, formally, with
several other types of artefact: screenfold books, sacred bundles, mirrors, quilted
armour, and shields. Although made of cotton and paint, the original Lienzo aspired
to what I call a polymorphous physicality. That is, through formal citations, it tried
to be several types of object all at once. By thinking not just about the content of
the Lienzo iconographically (the story it told) but also about the form in which that
iconography was embedded, this essay considers the lost materiality of the Lienzo – a
lost materiality that, in turn, transforms our understanding of the Lienzo’s historical
narrative.
Trap/Trapdoor
The polymorphous physicality of the lost Lienzo is especially important in the
context of this special issue, because it highlights two aspects of the object’s

cleverness. First, the Lienzo’s evocations of other artefacts were intended by its
makers to enhance the iconographic story that the cloth told, making its visual
arguments fascinating to viewers. These citational references are subtle, and so may
take the observer unaware. This camouflaged irresistibility was a trap-like aspect
of the Lienzo’s physical form, an intentional consequence of its composition. But
the Lienzo’s polymorphous physicality has unintended consequences as well. These
become especially apparent now that the Lienzo has been recreated digitally. This is
a second, trapdoor-like aspect of the Lienzo’s clever design. By opening unexpected
passageways between the past and the present, the Lienzo as trapdoor allows us to
consider the long history of appropriations of Western technologies in the service
of Mesoamerican visuality. In other words, the dematerialized digital recreation
of the Lienzo’s surface imagery is a clever expansion of the dialectics of iconography
and object already materialized in the 1552 original.
Cleverness
The word ‘clever’ seems to have emerged in English in the sixteenth century. The
Oxford English Dictionary links it to the Middle English clivers (claws, talons, clutches),
in the sense of ‘nimble of claws, sharp to seize’. One early use of the word ‘clever’
appears in a book published in 1562 – the same year, fortuitously, that a long-
planned Tlaxcalan embassy left Mexico for Madrid, possibly bearing the Lienzo
across the waters of the Atlantic. Bulleins Bulwarke of defence againste all Sicknes, Sornes, and
Woundes contains a section of dialogues in which ‘Marcellus’ and ‘Hillarius’ discuss
the properties of herbs used to make simples. On folio 53r, Marcellus asks: ‘What
vertue is in a wede, which we cal Gosegrasse: some people call it Hare weede. It
groweth in hedges, it haue rough leaues and berries, whych berries hangeth by
coples: and will cleue unto menne or womens clothes, and therefore some doe call
it Cleuer grasse ...’ Hillarius then explains the properties of this cleaving, clever
grass: ‘this herbe and sede dronke in wine, preuaile against stinging of venemous
thinges: and the iuce distilled in theare [the ear], helpeth them [that cannot well
heare]. This herbe tempered wyth freshe Swines grease, healeth Struma, or paines
in the throte, applied to the same place: the iuce thereof sayth Plini, stoppeth blood
in a freshe wounde, and heale the same.’7 The connections between the formal
properties of these clinging seeds and the ailments they cure are striking. One
might be tempted to read this relationship between seed and virtues in terms of
purely cognitive schemes, a Foucauldian ‘prose of the world’.8 But I am more
interested in how the fates of the clever grass seed relate to the world of practice.
A physical property of this seed (its ability to grab hold of passers-by with tiny
barbed fi ngers, and thus be carried on to new pastures) is used to reveal other,
hidden qualities, potential entelechies within the original form (entelechy: from
the Greek én, in; télos, end, or purpose; and échein, to have).9 Covered with tiny
barbs, the seed can soothe stings. Its clinging surface contains the power to knit
wounds together. Clever grass makes muffled hearing clear again: ears regain
their power to reach out into the world and grab hold of sounds. And, finally, this
cleaving seed can cure struma, that is, scrofula: its clawed vegetal fi ngers standing
in for the soft hands of the King.10 A form that emerged to do a specific kind of
shady work, turning passers-by into its vehicles, is repurposed by its victims to
new ends. The clever grass seed provides us with a sixteenth-century parable
for thinking about the dynamism of clever objects: aggressive traps can also be
expansive trapdoors.

Focal Points
The focus of this essay constantly zooms in and out, moving from broader contexts,
to detailed considerations of iconography and materiality, to broader contexts once
again. This formal structure is meant to evoke the embodied visual experience that
the original Lienzo made possible. When displayed, viewers could have looked at the
Lienzo from a distance, seeing it all at once – and they could have moved in closer, in
order to appreciate individual scenes.11 At the same time, the graphic layout of this
essay aims to evoke the graphic layout of the Lienzo (a formal parallel between object
and argument also pursued by some of my fellow contributors). Just as the Lienzo is
composed of a series of brief vignettes, each headed with an alphabetic caption, so
too is this essay divided into a series of titled sections, each containing either a short
paragraph of text, or a single image.12 This gives equal weight to the pictorial and
the alphabetic, and at the same time evokes Mesoamerican categorizations which
blur the boundaries of ‘writing’ and ‘image’.13 The first sections situate the Lienzo
in two historical moments. I discuss why the Lienzo was created around 1552, and
why its 1892 incarnation is so problematic. I then consider two aspects of the Lienzo’s
polymorphous physicality: its formal evocations of screenfold books and sacred
bundles. These formal evocations, I argue, underscore key features of the Lienzo’s
iconography. But these iconographic-material connections are difficult in many
ways to see, and so the essay steps back to consider the Mesoamerican category of an
‘instrument of seeing’ and its relation to indigenous fascinations with the interplay
of visibility and invisibility. Discussion then returns to the Lienzo, revealing additional
aspects of its complex compositional structure: its formal evocations of mirrors,
shields, and quilted armour. The final sections move again to broader vistas, focusing
on the cleverness of the Lienzo: the originally intended traps it laid for viewers, and
the unintended trapdoors it contained, trapdoors opened up by its current digital
incarnation.
1552, 1562
Why was the original Lienzo created? According to Tlaxcala’s (indigenous) city
council minutes, plans were made on 17 June 1552 to send a delegation across
the Atlantic to meet with the Emperor, Charles V. This was not unusual: several
Tlaxcalan embassies had already traversed the ocean to present petitions before
the Crown, the earliest in 1528.14 As part of this planned delegation, a painting
was to be prepared showing the arrival of Hernán Cortés in Tlaxcala and the
subsequent overthrow of the Aztec empire by the Tlaxcalans and their Spanish
allies.15 However, the embassy to Europe first proposed in 1552 took a number of
years to make ready. Among other things, feather capes had to be fashioned for the
Tlaxcalan ambassadors (these were completed in 1556). As far as we can tell, the
journey first discussed in 1552 did not take place until 1562.16 We do not know if
the ambassadors took the Lienzo with them. In any case, their stay in Madrid was
successful. The Tlaxcalans received a number of privileges. The official title granted
to Tlaxcala in 1535 (‘The Loyal City of Tlaxcala’) was expanded in 1562: Tlaxcala
was now to be known as ‘The Very Noble and Loyal City of Tlaxcala’.17 This title
was not simply honorary: it confirmed Tlaxcala’s legal status. As a City, Tlaxcala was
subject directly to the Crown, and not to any intermediate political authority (such
as another community or a titled lord). This was the highest status a municipality
could receive.18 In addition, the indigenous government of Tlaxcala established
in 1545 (a government whose structure combined European and indigenous
forms) was officially confirmed. Outside interference in indigenous markets

was prohibited. The viceroy in Mexico City was ordered to fix the boundaries of
Tlaxcala as a province. Finally, six Tlaxcalan nobles were granted their own coats
of arms. As we will see, many of the honours granted to the 1562 embassy are
intimately related to themes encoded in the Lienzo: the direct connection of Tlaxcala
to the Crown; the importance of geography and boundaries; the status conferred
by coats of arms.
1562, 1862, 1892

Although we don’t know if the Lienzo actually travelled across the Atlantic in 1562,
one eighteenth-century source claims that three copies of the document were
originally created: one to send to Emperor Charles V in Spain, one to send to the
viceroy in Mexico City, and one to remain in Tlaxcala.19 Whatever the case, a
sixteenth-century Lienzo did indeed exist in Tlaxcala in the late eighteenth century,
when an alphabetic description was written and a new copy painted (a copy that
preserved the basic visual layout but transformed the imagery in a number of
ways: adding shadows, simplifying details and, in a number of cases, interpreting
male figures as female). Not quite a century later, during the French ‘intervention’
of 1862 to 1867, the ancient Lienzo was taken to Mexico City so that the French
Scientific Commission could make another copy. When Emperor Maximilian was
executed and Mexican independence restored (an event made famous by Édouard
Manet), the people of Tlaxcala tried to reclaim their stolen document. But it had
disappeared, and remains lost. Fortunately, a copy on paper had indeed been
created. By the mid-1880s it was owned by Mexican historian Alfredo Chavero.
It consisted of two parts: ‘tracings which were taken directly from the original’,
along with ‘a very exact copy, carefully drawn, and for which colours were made
to perfectly match the original’.20 In 1892 – as part of Mexico’s contribution
to a Columbus Quatrocentenary exhibition in Madrid – Chavero published
a lithographic edition of the coloured tracings in the Homenaje á Cristóbal Colón:
Antigüedades mexicanas.
2 Isolation.

3 Exposición. The Unclever Object

Unfortunately, the material form of Chavero’s lithographed edition has actively
prevented us from understanding a number of fundamental aspects of the lost
Lienzo, both as an iconographic assemblage and as a physical object. One way to
approach the cleverness of the original Lienzo is to contrast it with the uncleverness
of its lithographic reproduction. The original Lienzo, as shown in Parergon,
consisted of a series of vignettes packed together in a seven by thirteen grid,
below a massive diagram of Tlaxcala’s political structure. When the lithographed
edition was created, however, each vignette was published as a separate scene, on
a separate plate of paper (see Isolation, plate 2). A numbered schematic diagram of
the Lienzo as a whole was included in the 1892 publication, showing where each
scene fit in the overall grid. However, the sea of paper surrounding each printed
vignette effectively prevented the plates from being laid out together to recreate
the tightly packed iconography of the original. Indeed, the inaugural display of
the lithographs at the 1892 Exposición Histórico-Americana made no attempt to
replicate the physical appearance of the lost cloth (see Exposición, plate 3).21 In the
first room of the Mexican Galleries, surrounded by costumed mannequins and
plaster casts of Aztec statuary, a selection of plates from the lithographed edition

were mounted edge-to-edge, uncropped, in an eleven by five layout. In other

words, only part of the Lienzo was displayed in this fi rst room, and no effort was
made to reproduce its seven by thirteen format. Subsequent facsimiles of the 1892
lithographed edition have joined the originally free-floating plates together as
spine-bound books.22 Each image remains surrounded by an ocean of blankness,
presented as an independent page. In turn, these individual scenes are frequently
reproduced as single illustrations in both academic and popular publications. When
Latin Americanists think of the Lienzo – and I speak from my own experience – they
typically think of it as a series of isolated scenes, not as a massive visual statement.
This visual fragmentation is not a trivial detail. The physical form of the 1892
lithographs has concealed many aspects of the Lienzo’s composition for more than
a century. The lithographic edition is a very unclever object. Of course – as one
reviewer stressed to me – it was certainly possible for buyers of the Homenaje to cut
up the plates and reassemble the Lienzo themselves. Historically, however, this never
seems to have happened.23 And even if it had, the Homenaje presented at least two
additional pitfalls to the ambitious scissor-wielder. None of the scenes in the Lienzo’s
thirteenth row were lithographically reproduced, and their existence was not
indicated in the schematic diagram of the document (which included only twelve
rows of cells, not thirteen). These missing scenes can be reconstructed from other
sources (and they are included in my digital recreation), but those other sources
were themselves only published in the 1980s.24 The Homenaje presents its would-be
users with many traps, but few if any trapdoors.25
Grids
The Lienzo was not simply an accumulation of separate vignettes. It was a composition
of images in dialogue with one another: horizontally, vertically, and in terms of their
spatial position within the cloth as a whole. We will now start to consider how the
Lienzo’s surface narrative was amplified through formal reference to other types of
object – the first of which is the gessoed screenfold book. Centuries before Europeans
arrived in the New World, people in Mesoamerica had developed their own literate
traditions for recording history – and for looking into the future as well. From the
first emergence of Mesoamerican writing, grids were used as a basic organizing
principle. Indigenous hieroglyphs were typically arranged in neatly aligned columns
and rows.26 In fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Tlaxcala, grids ordered the
information stored in screenfold divinatory almanacs. Made from gessoed deerskin
4 Gesso and Deerskin. or bark paper, several of these Tlaxcalan almanacs, painted both before and after

5 Row 4. the arrival of the Europeans, have survived.27 Their contents deal with the complex
numerical computations needed to interpret the Mesoamerican calendar. Gesso and
Deerskin (plate 4) shows three pages of one prehispanic Tlaxcalan almanac, the Codex
Borgia. Two different grid styles appear on these consecutive pages (two of the many
types of grids used in the document as a whole). By ordering the majority of the
Lienzo’s space into a grid, its artists were drawing on an ancient tradition, and referring
to a specific type of artefact.
Viceregal Transformations
At the same time, these artists transformed their traditions as well. Created in
part for an audience of indigenous viewers – not least the Tlaxcalan city council
who commissioned it – the Lienzo was also designed to be seen by European eyes
on the other side of the Atlantic. Accordingly, its creators merged what they knew
about both European and Mesoamerican literacies when designing the cloth’s
basic structure. Small-scale arrangements of grids, such as those in the Codex Borgia,
were in the Lienzo magnified to an enormous scale. These grids were painted, not
on pages of burnished gesso, but on cloth. In addition, the main reading order of
the Lienzo departed from prehispanic models. The grids in prehispanic screenfolds
were read in a number of different ways, often zigzagging dynamically across
several pages.28 In contrast, the reading order of the Lienzo’s grid followed European
models. The Lienzo’s images were to be read one cell at a time, one line at a time,
left to right, top to bottom. In other words, if the Lienzo’s grid was inspired by
prehispanic Mesoamerican books, the reading order of that grid was inspired by
European literate traditions.
1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13
The mixed Mesoamerican-European nature of the Lienzo’s grid is apparent in its
seven-by-thirteen structure as well. Thirteen was a cosmologically significant
number in Mesoamerica (in contrast to the European emphasis on twelve). Seven
was a cosmologically significant number in Europe, still attested in our familiar
reckonings of days of the week or deadly sins. Seven times thirteen equals ninety-
one, which is also the sum of all of the numbers one to thirteen. Given that
the gridded structure of the Lienzo was probably inspired by the gridded pages
of Tlaxcalan almanacs, books which dealt with calendrics and mathematics,
we should not be surprised to discover a complex, cross-cultural numerology
embedded in the lost cloth surface.

Seven Days
Indeed, in at least one instance the seven-cell-wide format of the Lienzo was used to
enhance the meaning of the images it contained. The final cells of Row 3 imagined
how, on the night of 30 June 1520, the joint Tlaxcalan-European army fled in defeat
from Tenochtitlan, suffering heavy casualties. Row 4 then chronicled the tattered
army’s return to safety in Tlaxcala (see Row 4, plate 5). According to a day-by-day
account recorded in the Second Letter of Hernán Cortés, this journey took seven
days, a European week. These seven days were strategically mapped onto the seven
cells of Row 4.29 For example, according to Cortés the retreating army rested for
all of the fourth day (4 July), which turned out to have been the half-way point
in their journey to Tlaxcala. Appropriately, the fourth (middle) cell of the Lienzo’s
Row 4 depicted the army at rest, its soldiers not fighting but sleeping. Details in
the subsequent cells of Row 4 showed events which Cortés described as taking
place between 5 and 7 July: the butchering of a horse for food (the fifth cell); an
unexpected victory brought about by the capture of an enemy battle standard (the
sixth cell).30 On Sunday 8 July, the fleeing army at last reached Tlaxcalan territory.
This arrival was shown in the first cell of Row 5. In other words, the seven cells
of Row 4 represented the first seven days in July 1520. Tlaxcalan artists merged
the chronological structure of the European week, the formal structure of the
Lienzo’s grid, and the narrative structure of the events which took place after the
Tlaxcalan-European army fled from Tenochtitlan on 30 June. This dense symbolic
interweaving was no accident. The reason the Lienzo’s artists chose to highlight this
week – and the many battles and hardships it involved – was to stress how many
opportunities the Tlaxcalans had to betray the retreating Europeans, but did not.
These difficult seven days also served to set up the events in Row 5, whose central
image (discussed below) concerned promises that Cortés made to the Tlaxcalans
as a reward for their loyalty. Row 4, in other words, was a complex meditation
on history and the structure of time, and helped to emphasize events in the row
immediately below.
Sacred Bundles
To understand why the central image of Row 5 was so important, and why all of
Row 4 prepared readers for its appearance, we need to consider a second material
citation made by the composition of the Lienzo: the sacred bundle. Sacred bundles
were an important feature of prehispanic religion. Images of the patron deities
of a community would live most of their lives wrapped in cloth, hidden from
view.31 The Lienzo illustrated one such sacred bundle, housed within a temple (see

6 Smoking Mirror.
Smoking Mirror, plate 6). The bundle’s white expanse curved above a severed
horse’s head (indicating a trophy, or an exotic, supernatural being). On top of the
bundle was drawn a humanlike head, with a round mirror hanging from its neck.
These crowning details indicated what image the cloth wrappings concealed – in
this case the god Tezcatlipoca, ‘Smoking Mirror’. It is important to stress that
the objects within sacred bundles were normally hidden. Unwrapping sacred
bundles, revealing their contents, unleashed their power. The Tlaxcalan Codex
Borgia (which we met in Gesso and Deerskin, above) contains a scene in which
one of these bundles is opened: clouds of darkness pour out.32 One witness
in a 1539 inquisitorial investigation from Mexico City testified that a sacred
bundle once housed in the Great Temple was so powerful that it killed whoever
unwrapped it.33 Sacred bundles thus contained extremely important objects
whose terrible power was normally concealed in a textile cocoon. The Lienzo
de Tlaxcala, as I argue in the next sections, was like a sacred bundle not simply
because it was made of cloth, but because its most potent scenes were located in
its physical centres.
Tenochtitlan
The seven by thirteen format of the Lienzo created a central column (the fourth), a
central row (the seventh), and thus a central cell within the grid as a whole: the
forty-second. Compositionally, this cell’s contents were very unusual – so visually
striking that this cell could be picked out from a distance (see Cell 42, plate 7). At the
centre was an architectural platform on a round island, surrounded by a circular
lake, and framed on four sides by lakeshore communities. This was a schematic
map of Lake Texcoco and its central island, on which was built the Aztec capital
of Tenochtitlan. Much of the Lienzo’s narrative told how an alliance of Tlaxcalans
and Europeans conquered the Aztec empire: fighting their way to its capital city,

retreating in defeat on 30 June 1520, coming back a second time for victory in
August 1521, and then spreading out across Mesoamerica to capture provinces once
ruled from Tenochtitlan. Cell 42 concerned the second, successful assault on the
Aztec capital.34 Tenochtitlan was the dominant political power in late prehispanic
Mesoamerica, and this importance was signalled by its physical position at the
exact centre of the Lienzo’s grid. By stressing the centrality and significance of
Tenochtitlan, the authors of the Lienzo underscored the magnitude of what they –
the Tlaxcalans – had helped the Europeans to achieve.
Tlaxcallan
The Lienzo, of course, presented a specifically Tlaxcalan vision of history. And so it
is not surprising that the creators of the Lienzo embedded a second centre within
its imagery – a second centre that was far more important to the document as a
whole. If cell 42 was at the exact centre of the grid, the exact centre of the cloth was
located two cells up – originally about 2.5 metres down from the top (or up from
the bottom). This central cell, cell 29 in Row 5, was visually flagged in a number
of ways (see Cell 29, plate 8). As we saw in Seven Days, the row above cell 29, Row
4, chronicled the first week of July 1520, providing a numerically structured
preparation for the events in Row 5. Within Row 5 itself, cell 29 was framed on
the left and right by double-wide cells, which can be seen to either side of the
cell-29-obscuring camera flash in Parergon. In other words cell 29 was visually
framed, highlighted, by a disruption in the ordered grid that surrounded it. The
cell’s importance was further underscored by its alphabetic label: it took place at
‘Tlaxcallan’. The Lienzo thus presented Tlaxcala as the central pivot around which
all other events radiated. The centrality of this Tlaxcalan scene probably related in
complex ways to how the Lienzo was physically handled. Whenever the sheet was
stored (in 1787 it was kept in the Chest of Privileges in Tlaxcala’s city hall), the core
image of Tlaxcala could be embedded – like a sacred idol – in the very centre of its
folds.35
Covenant
7 Cell 42. Cell 29 did not simply place Tlaxcala at the physical centre of the Lienzo’s story. It also
8 Cell 29. signalled a turning-point in the narrative. It contained a deceptively simple scene.

In the middle of the cell, Cortés was shown speaking with one of the four rulers of
Tlaxcala. Malinche, an indigenous translator, stood below. Floating above all three
was a gilded, feathered sun. The concentration of green in the feathers radiating from
this solar sign made it clearly visible from a distance. The depiction of a sun rising
in Tlaxcala at the exact centre of the Lienzo was no trivial detail. In origin stories told
throughout Mesoamerica, sunrises symbolically separated a past age of barbarity
from the civilized age of the narrator’s present.36 As we discussed above in Seven
Days, after the first attempt to conquer Tenochtitlan failed, Cortés and his joint
European-indigenous army retreated to safety in Tlaxcala. According to an account
written in Tlaxcala in 1562, Cortés then rewarded his loyal allies by promising them
that Tlaxcala would have an elevated status in the new viceregal order.37 Cell 29 took
place about a week after the first attempt to conquer Tenochtitlan had failed. The
dawn-lit conversation it depicted was probably meant to show the moment in which
Cortés rewarded the Tlaxcalans with promises of prestige. A New Sun dawned above
a covenant between Tlaxcalans and Europeans, a covenant which set the foundation
for Tlaxcala’s privileged position in what would become New Spain. If the Lienzo was
created in preparation for an audience with the Emperor, this central image was
meant to remind Charles V why he must agree to Tlaxcalan demands. Indeed, it is
probably no accident that 1562 is the first year in which alphabetic accounts refer to
this covenant. This was the same year that the Tlaxcalan embassy in preparation since
1552 finally departed for Madrid.
Standing Back
The previous sections have moved back and forth from materiality to iconography,
arguing that the Lienzo’s formal references to two other artefact types (the gridded
surfaces of screenfold books, the enveloped images of sacred bundles) were
deployed by Tlaxcalan artists in order to enhance the textile’s ostensible narrative.
I have argued that some of these visual features could be seen from a distance – the
round lake in cell 42, the feathered sun in cell 29. But these two central scenes were
embedded within a riotous – and enormous – field of other images. The calendric
symbolism evoked by the seven scenes of Row 4 was especially subtle. Before moving
on to consider the Lienzo’s connectedness to yet other kinds of objects, and the way
these material references further transformed the meaning of the Lienzo’s surface
iconography, I want to take a step back.
Instruments of Seeing
The polymorphous physicality of the lost Lienzo is closely connected to the
Mesoamerican category of an instrument of seeing, a category which linked
together heterogeneous objects made from very different substances.38 Around
1558, in the highlands of Guatemala (a region whose conquest is depicted in the
twelfth row of the Lienzo), the Maya nobility of Santa Cruz Quiché translated the
contents of a pictorial-hieroglyphic ‘Council Book’ into alphabetic script. Their
alphabetic transcription of this Popol Vuh refers back to its original source several
times. The source is called an ilb’al re: literally, an ‘instrument of seeing’. This
term would be used by the Quiché for centuries. In a late seventeenth-century
dictionary, il’bal re was defined a ‘figure, picture’. In the late twentieth century,
il’bal was used to refer to the crystals and maize kernels used in divination, as well
as to eyeglasses, binoculars, and telescopes.39 Thus the Quiché category of il’bal,
‘instrument of seeing’, joins written texts, eyeglasses, pictures, and the crystals and
kernels of sortilege divination.

Book, Mirror
A similar category existed in Central Mexico at the time the Lienzo was created. One
of the common features of Nahuatl (the language spoken by most Tlaxcalans) is its
use of difrasismos. These are pairs of words which, together, refer metaphorically to
a third concept. For example, in tlilli, in tlapilli (‘the black, the red’) was a metaphor
for writing (made of black and red – or coloured – ink). In mitl in chimalli (‘the
arrow, the shield’) was a metaphor for warfare.40 One difrasismo that has escaped
notice until now paired tezcatl, mirror, with amoxtli, book. This was a metaphor
for communicative signs in general, and is attested in several early viceregal
sources. In the late 1570s, the Nahuatl-Spanish General History of the Things of New
Spain paired mirror and book (in timotezcavico, in timamuxvico) to refer to the omen
of an animal’s cry.41 Decades later, in 1629, priest Ruíz de Alarcón recorded two
Nahuatl incantations where in namox, in notezcauh (‘my book, my mirror’) was used
to refer to the maize kernels cast in sortilege divination.42 These poetic pairings
of ‘book’ and ‘mirror’ take their meaning from the role of books and mirrors in
Mesoamerican societies. Both were used to enhance the user’s vision, allowing
glimpses into the past and the future (in historical narratives, divinatory almanacs,
and the revelatory patterns of light on the surface of a mirror). Physically, the
surface of a screenfold book was also a shining, mirror-like thing: its gesso
burnished to reflectivity, its surface varnished so that it ‘becomes just like crystal;
there we can see ourselves’.43 The way books and mirrors allowed their users to
gaze across space and time connected them to other sign-reading techniques,
such as casting maize kernels or listening to the cries of animals.44 From the
highlands of Guatemala to the highlands of Central Mexico, instruments of seeing
took very different – but interconnected – forms. Merging a wide assortment of
seemingly disparate objects, the material and conceptual associations encouraged
by this category provide a key context for understanding the Lienzo’s polymorphous
physicality.
(In)visibility
However, the visions across time and space that instruments of seeing made possible
were not easy to interpret. Books and mirrors were prototypical instruments of
seeing, but their images were difficult to read. Mesoamerican literacy was not
widespread, and access to screenfold books – and to the knowledge required to
use them – was limited.45 The arcane and subtle patterns painted on the surface
of the Lienzo should be understood in terms of a Mesoamerican aesthetic tension
linking the legible to the unreadable, the visible to the invisible.46 The following
four sections illustrate the complexities of gazing into Mesoamerican instruments
of seeing, and are meant to provide models for thinking about how the Lienzo was
looked at. Commoners and Deer reproduce sixteenth-century textual accounts of
mirror divination. Both emphasize the opacity of instrumentally enhanced vision.
Yet even before the arrival of the Europeans, the images seen in scrying devices
challenged interpretation. Turquoise (plate 9) and Fugitive Images illustrate and
discuss turquoise mosaic ‘mirrors’, a class of late prehispanic artefact whose surfaces
materialize an aesthetic play between the seen and the unseen.
Commoners
A witness in a 1539 inquisitorial investigation in Mexico City recalled the conquest of
Tenochtitlan in 1521:

9 Turquoise.
… and in addition he heard from his cousin that when the war between
Christians and Natives was being fought in the Plaza of Mexico –
Moctezuma being already dead – the Lord of Tacuba (who was called
Tetlepanquetzal, later baptized as Don Pedro) climbed up to the top
of the Pyramid of Huitzilopochtli, and he had a mirror which the
Indians called Navaltezcatl, which means Mirror of Divinations or
Soothsayer, and on top of the said pyramid the said Don Pedro took
out the said mirror in the presence of Cuanacutuci Lord of Texcoco
and of Oquica Lord of Azcaputzalco and the said Don Pablo his cousin
(and Cuauhtemoc [successor to Moctezuma] should have also gone to
see it as well but he could not because of the [city’s] disorder), and the
ceremony was performed behind the houses of the idols which were
on top of the pyramid, because the Christians wandered fighting below
in the plaza. And when the said Don Pedro said his words of witchcraft
or enchantments the mirror grew dark, and there was only a small part
that was clear, in which appeared a few commoners, and crying the said
Don Pedro said to them we should tell the Lord (who was Cuauhtemoc)
that they should get out, because they would lose Mexico, and thus all
descended, and the mirror was large and round, and the Lord of Tacuba
took it with him, because it was his.47

As conquest warfare raged in the streets and plazas of Tenochtitlan, four

Aztec nobles climbed to the summit of the city’s main pyramid. This was the
symbolic centre of the Aztec empire. Hidden in the shadow of two temples
at the building’s summit, the Lord of Tacuba brought out a mirror and ‘said
his words of witchcraft’. The object’s surface grew dark. In the small patch
which remained clear, a phantasmal image of common people could be seen.
This glimpse of things to come was both simple and troubling. It suggested
not only the plagues that would decimate Central Mexico’s population in the
coming decades, but also the collapse of traditional status hierarchies and the
disappearance of noble lineages. In the Lord of Tacuba’s vision of the future,
few people would be left alive in Central Mexico, and they would all be
commoners.
Deer
Some fifty years after the fall of Tenochtitlan, the inhabitants of Central Mexico
recounted eight omens which foretold the coming of the Europeans. One involved a
strange bird with a mirror in its head, brought before the Aztec emperor Moctezuma
around 1517:
The seventh omen, at one time the fisher folk hunted or snared with nets.
They took a bird of ashen hue, like a crane. Then they came to show it
to Moctezuma, [who was in] the Tlillan calmecac [Black Place House of
Lineage]. The sun was past its zenith, and there was yet daylight. There
was what was like a mirror upon its head – round, disk-like, and as if
pierced. From it appeared the heavens – the fire drill [constellation], the
stars. And Moctezuma took it as a most evil omen when he saw the stars
and the fire drill. And when he gazed a second time at the bird’s head,
beyond, he beheld what appeared to be like a number of people, coming
massed, coming as conquerors, coming in war panoply. Deer [horses]
bore them upon their backs. And then he summoned the astrologers
and the wise men, and said to them: ‘Do you not know what I have seen
there, like a number of people coming massed?’ And when they were
about to answer, that which they looked at vanished. They could say
nothing.48
As with the vision conjured by the Lord of Tacuba at the summit of the Great
Temple of Tenochtitlan, the images seen by Moctezuma were spare and esoteric,
yet disturbing. When the emperor fi rst looked into the avian mirror, he saw
the fi re drill constellation – probably the three stars in the belt of Orion, a
Mesoamerican symbol of origins and the emergence of new cycles of time.49
But when he looked again, he saw something far more alien: warriors riding
on what looked like deer – that is, European conquistadors mounted on horses.
Moctezuma seems to have understood the fi rst vision, grounded as it was in
indigenous symbolism. But the second vision, with its image of strange European
beasts, was confusing to him, and so he summoned the help of astrologers. Yet
before they could offer their interpretations, this second image vanished. ‘They
could say nothing.’

Fugitive Images
These sixteenth-century descriptions of Mesoamerican catoptromancy emphasize
the fugitive and obscure nature of the glimpses across time and space that
instruments of seeing made possible. The visions seen by the Lord of Tacuba and
Moctezuma were fleeting and partial – and, in the case of the mounted soldiers,
hard to interpret. This opacity was not simply an effect of European disruptions.
The sheer difficulty of using such devices to look beyond the present is physically
manifest in a class of objects produced in late prehispanic Mesoamerica. These
are the so-called turquoise mosaic shields.50 On a base made of wood, a complex
image was created using tesserae of blue stones (as well as smaller amounts of
obsidian, shell, and pyrite). These objects are usually round (see Turquoise), but at
least one rectangular, book-like example survives.51 Their subject matter typically
refers to primordial events: the viewer is allowed a fleeting glimpse into the distant
past. Because most of the surface of these objects was covered with turquoise,
artists relied on subtle variations in shades of blue to differentiate the images
marked out in tesserae. This often meant that the iconography of these surfaces
was – and remains – very hard to read. One example, now in the Museo Templo
Mayor in Mexico City, makes its pale blue figures easier to see by outlining them
in halos of darker blue stones. But other examples present highly fugitive images,
almost monochrome, difficult to make out (see Turquoise). In other words, these
sparkling surfaces present blue-on-blue scenes of ancient events that hover between
the visible and the invisible. Instruments of seeing were powerful artefacts, but
they did not necessarily provide clear-sightedness. And with this in mind, we
return to the Lienzo de Tlaxcala.
Halves
The two centres of the Lienzo – showing Tenochtitlan and Tlaxcala – made the
cloth as a whole into kind of sacred bundle. But these dual centres had additional
10 Two Centres. tasks to perform. They extended the polymorphous physicality of the Lienzo even

further, transforming it into a shining mirror. Cells 29 and 42 each divided the
Lienzo into two halves (see left pair of images in Two Centres, plate 10). Cell 42,
the Tenochtitlan centre, divided the Lienzo’s grid into differently coloured halves.
The cells that followed cell 42 used large amounts of yellow, green, and beige
pigments, which contrasted with the whiter colouration of cells 1 to 42. The two
halves produced by cell 29, the Tlaxcalan centre, were more complex, but no
less visual. Cell 29 divided the Lienzo into two gendered halves, each under the
patronage of a different Spanish divinity. The cells before cell 29 were dominated
by scenes involving Malinche, Cortés’s female translator (see Cell 29, above).
She appeared in nineteen of the twenty-eight scenes which preceded cell 29 (see
Two Centres, second from the right). After cell 29, Malinche all but disappeared,
being present in only two subsequent scenes (even though she was a participant
in many of the events which followed cell 29). Given that her name is a Nahuatl
transformation of María, and given that her representation is almost identical
to that of two images of the Virgin Mary in the Lienzo, Federico Navarrete argues
that Malinche appeared in the Lienzo as an incarnation of the Mother of God,
making holy Tlaxcalan history.52 Appropriately, the fi rst half of the Lienzo – where
Malinche constantly appeared – focused on scenes of dialogue and intercession.
Malinche was a translator, speaking on behalf of Europeans and Native
Americans; the Virgin Mary was and is an abogada, a lawyer who pleads with
God on behalf of her human worshippers.53 In contrast, the second half of the
Lienzo, the half that began after cell 29, was focused not on dialogue but warfare.
Scenes after cell 29 were dominated by images of a mounted conquistador,
whom Navarrete identifies as an incarnation of Santiago Matamoros, a Spanish
warrior-saint (see Two Centres, far right).54 The basic template of the ‘Santiago’
scenes was repeated forty-nine times in the second half of the Lienzo: a charging
Spaniard on the left, a mountainous place sign on the right. Careful eyes could
detect this visual rhythm when looking at the Lienzo from a distance. The differing
distributions of Malinche and Santiago, then, underscored the way cell 29 split
the Lienzo in two. In sum, the two centres of the Lienzo, cell 29 and cell 42, divided
its surface into two different halves. Focal point, upper half, lower half: this,
multiplied by two, was the basic spatial layout of the Lienzo.
Shining
Focal point, upper half, lower half: this is also the basic spatial layout of
Mesoamerican representations of mirrors and eyes. These are depicted as
circles with an upper half, a lower half, and a central focal point. For example,
Ixtli (plate 11) shows a page from the prehispanic Codex Laud, a Central Mexican
divinatory almanac. In the centre, the skeleton-monkey creature wears a red
and white mirror around its neck (compare with Smoking Mirror). Directly
below, in the lower margin of the page, is painted the head of the personified
Rain. His red and white round eye stares out from an encompassing blue circle.
Eyes and mirrors were both shining things, linked to sight, and this partially
explains their shared iconography. But in addition, disembodied eyeballs were
used in prehispanic and viceregal art to mark the surfaces of reflective things:
featherwork, splashing water, stars. This probably relates to a linguistic pun in
Nahuatl: the same word, ixtli, was used to mean eye, face, and surface. A shining
surface (ixtli) was therefore marked by an eye (ixtli).55 Dana Leibsohn argues
that eye-marked surfaces attracted human eyes to them through a kind of visual

11 Ixtli. homology.56 Shining surfaces were ‘eye-catching’ or ‘eye-popping’ things. They

drew humans and nonhumans together in sympathetic resonance: shining eyes
attracted shining eyes.
Tesserae
What all this suggests is that the Lienzo, at its deepest structural levels, was
conceived as a giant mirror, a giant staring eye. From a Mesoamerican
perspective, the eye-like structure of the Lienzo’s imagery would have had the
power to draw human eyes to it, ixtli to ixtli, in a circuit of mutual attraction.
Through its underlying formal structure, the Lienzo’s surface imagery was made
deeply compelling. The macro-visual image of the Lienzo as an enormous mirror-
eye may seem strange. From a Mesoamerican perspective, however, such an
interpretation would have made perfect sense. As we saw above, books and
mirrors were joined in a Nahuatl metaphor that encompassed communicative
signs in general. The burnished and varnished pages of books were shining,
mirror-like. As illustrated in Turquoise, one type of mirror common in
prehispanic Mesoamerica was made out of stone mosaics: turquoise, obsidian,
pyrite.57 The tessellated surfaces of these mirrors, made up of dozens of tiles, are
formally similar to the tessellated appearance of the Lienzo, made up of dozens
of painted cells. Furthermore, the Lienzo has a mirrored relationship to one of its
probable sources, a series of four scenes painted on bark paper and now housed in
the Benson Latin American Library in Austin, Texas. The four scenes of ‘the Texas
Fragment’ inspired the last four scenes in the fi rst row of the Lienzo (cells 4–7).58

Their visual style matches quite closely that of the Lienzo’s 1892 lithographs –
important evidence that these late nineteenth-century printings-of-tracings are
fairly faithful records of the lost document’s appearance. But when the artists of
the Lienzo copied the Texas Fragment, they made one major change: they reversed
the order of all of the figures. In the Texas Fragment scenes, Cortés and Malinche
are on the left, meeting Tlaxcalans on the right. In the Lienzo’s depiction of the
same scenes, the Tlaxcalans were on the left, meeting Cortés and Malinche on the
right (see Reversals, plate 12). The Lienzo’s relation to the Texas Fragment was like
that of a mirror, reflecting all of its images backwards.
Shields
The tessellated surface of the Lienzo connected to a final aspect of turquoise
mosaic mirrors, which underscores one last feature of the textile’s polymorphous
physicality: its formal connections to shields and armour. The Lienzo was a mirror-
like mosaic, akin to the artefact illustrated in Turquoise. But that glittering
blue disk has another symbolic reference as well: not simply a mirror, it is also
a shield.59 The same was true of the Lienzo: it was both mirror and shield at the
same time. The importance of shields to the makers of the Lienzo resonated in both
its iconographic surface and structural form. Representations of shields were
something of an obsession in the Lienzo. They were constantly depicted – only
eight of the Lienzo’s eighty-seven small cells did not contain images of shields. This
is another way that the artists of the Lienzo transformed the source-images in the
Texas Fragment, which depicts dozens of warriors but not a single shield. The Lienzo’s
artists even distinguished European versus Mesoamerican shield styles. This was
well illustrated in the battle scenes of Row 4, which contrasted round Central
Mexican chimaltin, lobed European adargas, and oval European escudos. When viewed
12 Reversals.

13 Charles V.
from a distance, shields were another feature of the Lienzo’s complex imagery that
jumped out at the viewer: the cloth surface was animated by their omnipresent
circular forms. The obsession with representing shields within the Lienzo’s grid
was underscored by the two shields in the scene at the very top of the composition
as a whole: the coat of arms of Tlaxcala (surrounded by a green bell-shaped hill)
and, directly above, the massive coat of arms of Emperor Charles V (see Parergon,
as well as Charles V, plate 13). The vertical pairing of these shields was no doubt
intentional: it visualized Tlaxcala’s status as a City, beholden to no one but the
Emperor himself.
Cellular Geography
The coat of arms of Charles V deserves closer attention, for it allows us to shift
from iconographic details to structural form. Like the Lienzo as a whole, this shield
was divided into dozens of cells by vertical and horizontal lines. Each of these cells
contained a distinct design, most of which had an explicit geographic symbolism,
referring to one or another of the kingdoms that made up the Holy Roman Empire.
This presentation of cellular geography was much like the composition of the
Lienzo. Most of the Lienzo’s cells were labelled with place names, and many of these
cells also contained prehispanic-style place glyphs. Remember that the Tlaxcalans
were granted their own coat of arms from Charles V in 1535. But here, in the Lienzo,
Tlaxcalan artists created a new historical heraldry on a massive scale. In 1552, 1562
I mentioned that when the Tlaxcalan embassy of 1562 finally arrived in Madrid, it
was quite successful, and received a number of privileges. Among these were the
granting of coats of arms to six Tlaxcalan noblemen, as well as an order for the
viceroy to confirm the limits of Tlaxcala as a province (which would make its borders

easier to defend in viceregal courtrooms). The Lienzo’s shield-like structure underlined

the kinds of demands it was created to support: the granting of coats of arms, the
delineation of territory.
Quilted Armour
It may seem strange to create a shield out of cotton cloth, but this would have
been an obvious protective material in the minds of both Native Americans and
Europeans. Prehispanic Central Mexicans had developed a style of quilted cotton
armour extremely effective in repelling arrows. This quilted armour appeared again
and again in the scenes of the Lienzo (the quilting indicated by a grid of lines; see
Row 4). Quilted armour was even adopted by European conquistadors for their own
protection, being lighter and cooler than armour made of metal. A most effective
shield on the battlefield, cotton cloth became a useful prophylactic in the royal court
as well.
Polymorphous Physicality
If the Lienzo de Tlaxcala was indeed commissioned on 17 September 1552, it was
created as an object to be brought before the Emperor Charles V, an object intended
to help Tlaxcalan emissaries assert, and protect, the rights of Tlaxcala as a City.
Given the context for which it was probably created, the Lienzo’s polymorphous
material references all make perfect sense. As a screenfold book, it allowed its
viewers to look into the historical past. As a sacred bundle, it contained at its centre
a precious image about the origins of Tlaxcala’s viceregal privileges. As an eye-like
mirror, it sought to fascinate the Emperor: to entrap him in a circuit of dazzling
fascinations and so make him receptive to Tlaxcalan demands. But as a shield and
suit of quilted armour, it aimed to defend the rights of Tlaxcala in the Imperial
Court. The Lienzo, then, is an apotropaic device, drawing and capturing the eye and
mind and thus paralysing the onlooker, rendering him defenceless.60 Or fascinated
and pliable.
Galium Aparine
The essay so far has focused on the intentional, and somewhat insidious, effects that
the Lienzo de Tlaxcala was meant to have on its viewers. In Alfred Gell’s terms, the cloth
was a weapon for psychological warfare.61 The compositional subtleties of the Lienzo’s
format were intended in many ways to function like the barbs of a clever grass seed:
reaching out to onlookers (imperial viewers above all), ensnaring them, turning
them into vehicles for ends they may not have originally intended. But remember
that Hillarius listed a number of ways in which these prickly para-parasites could be
repurposed by their intended human victims, being efficacious in various medicines.
The clever grass seed sought to trap passers-by, but passers-by could also use the
seeds as trapdoors, which when opened revealed hidden virtues. The Lienzo de Tlaxcala,
like the clever grass seed – and like clever objects in general – contains both of these
natures, trap and trapdoor.
Intended Consequences
In a series of essays on his anthropological theory of art, Alfred Gell foregrounds
the role of art-artefacts in human social relationships.62 In thinking about
the Lienzo de Tlaxcala as a clever object, I have also found it useful to think about
the social relations generated between this nonhuman object and its human
interlocutors. These relationships have two aspects, or two phases, revolving in

turn around intended and unintended consequences. The Lienzo was created to
achieve certain goals: to convince viewers of the importance of the Tlaxcalan-
European alliance in the conquest of Mexico, and to use this story as a foundation
for Tlaxcala’s privileged status in the viceregal order. On the surface, these goals
were communicated in a straightforward manner. Images told the bulk of the
story; brief alphabetic captions specified where scenes took place. But the Lienzo
was more complex, more clever than this, for its artists embedded those images
in a formal structure that made reference to a number of objects important in
both Mesoamerican and European material culture. These formal properties gave
additional force to the Lienzo’s surface iconography, enchanting it. This enchantment
is strongest in the mirror-like aspects of the Lienzo’s composition, in which the
entire surface becomes a stereoscopic eye – an eye which, from a Mesoamerican
perspective, would lure other eyes to its surface through the magic of sympathetic
resonance.
Camouflage
Lurking beneath the Lienzo’s surface iconography, then, was a complex set of
compositional mechanisms meant to give that surface iconography greater
power. Drawing on another Gellian idea, the surface iconography was a kind
of camouflage, serving to hide the conceptual traps beneath.63 As we have seen
several times already, Mesoamerican aesthetics privileged the interplay of the
seen and unseen. The creators of the Lienzo drew upon this aesthetic tradition to
make an object that became more and more compelling, fascinating, the more
one looked upon it. This hypnotic, kaleidoscopic visual effect was the intended
impact the creators of the Lienzo planned for the cloth to have on its audiences.
In Spain, the Lienzo was to entrance the Emperor and make him receptive to the
demands of Tlaxcalan ambassadors. Within Tlaxcala, the Lienzo would authorize
a particular vision of Tlaxcalan history, a version we know was in confl ict
with other visions, such as those of European witnesses or members of other
indigenous ethnic groups.64 It should be obvious that the Lienzo has not lost its
enchanting power. My arguments for its fascinating qualities are based on my
own reading of the document now, on my own seduction by the intersections of
its polymorphous physicality and surface iconography. I am projecting my own
entranced gazings back onto the minds of past creators and witnesses. The Lienzo’s
layered powers remain potent, even after five centuries. But these qualities are
only the intended consequences of the Lienzo as a social artefact, one aspect of its
dynamic as a clever object.
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

‘One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand
which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows
critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be
fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art
form.’65
Unintended Consequences
There is, of course, something very strange about the social context of the Lienzo
now. It no longer exists as a material thing. All of my discussion has been based
on interaction with an insubstantial image performed into being on computer
screens and printouts.66 This strange, immaterial apotheosis could not have been

predicted by the original creators of the Lienzo. Yet, paradoxically, this was an
incarnation already suggested by the Lienzo’s complex form. By designing the Lienzo
as a polymorphous artefact, the creators of the Lienzo also embedded unintended
entelechies within its structure, seeds of transformation that would have been
difficult to foresee. This is the second aspect of the Lienzo’s cleverness: the way it could
adapt to new circumstances, to unforeseen social relations. One feature of clever
objects is that they are open-ended things, and can surpass the original intentions of
their makers. New aspects of the original Lienzo as an object spring into view when
we start to think about its current disembodied incarnation, its relation to us now,
and the relations of its digital image to different Western technologies, both in the
present and in the sixteenth century.
Appropriations
The reconstituted Lienzo now exists as a performed image called into being by
complex machines. But we have already seen that Mesoamerican instruments
of seeing – such as the mirrors discussed in Commoners and Deer – were also
used to summon virtual images into existence. Mesoamerican books – also
instruments of seeing – were used in similar ways. They were not read silently,
alone, but served as scores whose contents were brought into social being
by oral and embodied performances (whether historical dramas or rituals of
divination).67 By extension, we can think of the machines now used to conjure
the Lienzo’s image as themselves transformed into instruments of seeing, co-
opted by the patterns of light they summon up. Again, the Lienzo was a materially
polymorphous object, appropriating a number of different artefact types ‘in
the background’ in order to make its surface iconography more forceful. It
might seem strange to think of contemporary techno-gadgets as yet another
type of object hijacked to serve the polymorphous communicative ends of the
Lienzo’s story. But the appropriation of Western technologies in the service of
Mesoamerican visuality, making instruments of seeing out of strange occidental
artefacts, has a long history. Indeed, thinking about the technological apotheosis
of the Lienzo, now, leads us back to consider additional aspects of the material-
historical context in which the Lienzo was created.
Eyeglasses
The polymorphous material references made by the Lienzo’s form are, in general,
to Mesoamerican objects. European materialities are, however, also evoked: the
reading order of the grid follows that of European books; the gridded geography
mimics the coat of arms of Charles V. The transatlantic material form of the
Lienzo points to broader processes of transformation in viceregal Mesoamerica.
As European goods arrived on the shores of the New World, many of them
were, at fi rst, interpreted not as radically new things but as variations of extant
Mesoamerican categories.68 Horses – as in the above-quoted account of the
Seventh Omen of the conquest of Mexico – were initially called deer. Similarly,
the Mesoamerican category of instrument of seeing was expanded to include
certain European things. For example, a number of Mesoamerican languages –
including Nahuatl – referred to European eyeglasses not using indigenous terms
for glass or crystal (to highlight their lenses) but instead the word for mirror.69
Eyeglasses were understood to be instruments of seeing – which they were, and
were not.

Compass, Map
Another example of this optical expansion is found in Cortés’s Fifth Letter to Emperor
Charles V, written in 1525. An indigenous plot to attack the Europeans was revealed
to Cortés by a Native American convert to Christianity (a man baptized as Cristóbal).
Cortés then imprisoned the accused lords, and in separate interrogations they confessed
their plot. The two leaders – including Moctezuma’s successor Cuauhtemoc, referred to
above in Commoners – were hanged, but the rest were pardoned. What is particularly
striking about this tragic course of events is that the survivors attributed prophetic
powers to Cortés’s use of certain European artefacts. Cortés wrote:
… as they have never discovered from whom I learnt of their plot, they
believe it was done by some magic act, and that nothing can be concealed
from me. Having observed that in order to be certain of my road I have
often taken out a ship’s chart and a compass, especially when cutting the
Çagoatezpan road which came through so accurately, they told many of the
Spaniards that it was there that I had learnt their secret. Some of them have
even come to me and, eager to show me their good intentions, have begged
me to look into the glass of it and the chart, because I would see there that
they spoke the truth, since through those objects I knew everything else. I
encouraged this belief, giving them to understand that the compass and the
chart did indeed reveal all things to me.70
Ship’s compass and chart, then, were interpreted as magical instruments of seeing.
Indeed, one of the terms used to translate compass (brujula) in a 1555 Spanish-Nahuatl
dictionary was yxtli.71 Like the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, European compasses were eye-like
surfaces, ixtli, instruments of seeing.
Reinterpretations
At the same time the creators of the Lienzo de Tlaxcala were painting a strange new
form of material culture – one that was a book and sacred bundle and mirror and
shield and quilted armour all at once – European objects arriving in Mesoamerica
were being given new powers, reinterpreted as instruments of seeing. These strange
imported artefacts were material things capable (in the right hands, under properly
trained eyes) of gazing across time and space. The Lienzo de Tlaxcala was therefore one
of a number of new instruments of seeing emerging in early viceregal Mesoamerica.
A repeated theme in recent writing about virtuality and digital technologies is how
those tools allow us to understand, or reframe, aspects of human society that long
predate computers per se. ‘We had a human/computer interface a hundred years
before we had computers’, writes Bruce Sterling.72 ‘We did not have to wait for
the computer screen or the movie projector in order to enter virtual space;’ argues
Elizabeth Grosz, ‘we have been living in its shadow more or less continually.’73 Or,
as Tom Boellstorff puts it: ‘Through culture, humans are always already virtual;
ethnography has always been a kind of virtual investigation of the human.’74 Because
of its polymorphous structure, the Lienzo was already, in the sixteenth century,
appropriating a number of different objects in the service of its surface iconography.
Its current digital incarnation cleverly expands on this aspect of its original form, and
in the process opens an unexpected trapdoor across time and space. The Lienzo’s oddly
appropriate interactions with contemporary technology help us to generate new
questions about its relationship to other artefacts, other instruments of seeing – both
in the sixteenth century, and in our present.

Parergon (plate 1): digital reconstruction of the now lost Lienzo de Tlaxcala, c. 1552. Original:
painted cotton cloth, c. 2 × 5 m. Photo: Author.
Isolation (plate 2): copy of cell 1 of the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, 1892. Lithograph on paper, 54 × 38 cm.
From Homenaje á Cristóbal Colón: Antigüedades mexicanas/publicadas por la Junta Colombina de
México en el cuarto centenario del descubrimiento de América, Mexico City, 1892, [unbound sheet].
Photo: Author.
Exposición (plate 3): the first Sala Mexicana in the Exposición Histórico-Americana, Madrid, 1892.
Photograph, 25 × 31.8 cm. Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional de España. Photo: © Gobierno de España,
Ministerio de Cultura.
Gesso and Deerskin (plate 4): pages 4 to 6 of the Codex Borgia, fifteenth century. Pigment on
gessoed deerskin, 27 × 27 cm (per page). Vatican City: Vatican Library. Photo: Author, reproduced by
permission of Akademische Druck-und Verlagsanstalt.
Row 4 (plate 5): digital reconstruction of the seven cells in row 4 of the Lienzo de Tlaxcala,
chronicling the flight of Tlaxcalans and Europeans from Mexico to Tlaxcala during the first seven days
of July 1520. Photo: Author.
Smoking Mirror (plate 6): detail of digital reconstruction of cell 41 of the Lienzo de Tlaxcala,
illustrating a Spaniard standing before the main temple of Texcoco inside which are displayed the
sacred bundle of Tezcatlipoca and a severed horse’s head. Photo: Author.
Cell 42 (plate 7): digital reconstruction of cell 42 of the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, illustrating indigenous
warriors preparing for the assault on the island-capital of Tenochtitlan. Photo: Author.
Cell 29 (plate 8): digital reconstruction of cell 29 of the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, illustrating Cortés,
Malinche, and a Tlaxcalan noble standing beneath a First Sunrise. Photo: Author.
Turquoise (plate 9): turquoise mosaic shield, 1400–1500. Turquoise and wood, 32.5 × 32.3 × 2 cm.
New York: Heye Foundation. Photo: Author.
Two Centres (plate 10): digital reconstruction illustrating visual structures in the Lienzo de Tlaxcala.
Left: the Mexican centre (cell 42, on left) and Tlaxcalan centre (cell 29, on right) with upper halves of
each textile ‘mirror’ shaded. Right: distribution of appearances of Malinche (shaded cells on left) and
‘Santiago’ warriors (shaded cells on right). Photo: Author.
Ixtli (plate 11): detail of page 11 of the Codex Laud, fifteenth century, illustrating mirror medallion
and mirror-like eyes. Pigment on gessoed deerskin, 17 × 22.5 cm (whole page). Oxford: Bodleian
Library. Photo: Author, reproduced by permission of Akademische Druck-und Verlagsanstalt.
Reversals (plate 12): comparison of cells 4 (upper right) and 5 (lower right) of the digital
reconstruction of the Lienzo de Tlaxcala with the corresponding scenes in the Texas Fragment
(upper and lower left). [Lienzo de Tlaxcala (Texas Fragment), c. 1540. Pigment on bark paper, 55.5
× 87 cm. Austin, TX: Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The
University of Texas at Austin.] Photos: Author/Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection.
Charles V (plate 13): detail of digital reconstruction of main scene of the Lienzo de Tlaxcala,
illustrating coat of arms of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V with a sample of the shield’s geographic
references labelled. Photo: Author.
Notes Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica, Norman, OK, 2008.

Thanks to Liza Bakewell, Travis Barton Kranz, Dana Leibsohn, 2 Accessible online at www.mesolore.org
Bryan Just, and above all my fellow participants in the Clever 3 See Joseph Koerner, ‘Factura’, Res, 36, 1999, 5–19.
Object project; Matt, Francesco, Caroline, Christiane, Katie, 4 Alfred Gell, ‘The enchantment of technology and the technology
Rachel. of enchantment’, in Eric Hirsch, ed., The Art of Anthropology: Essays and
Diagrams, London, 1999, 162; see also Tim Ingold, ‘On weaving a
basket’, in Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins, eds, The Object Reader,
1 For this history of the Lienzo, and a basic explanation of its scenes, see
London, 2009, 82.
Alfredo Chavero, ‘Explicación del Lienzo de Tlaxcala,’ in Homenaje á
5 Michael W. Cole, ‘Cellini’s blood’, The Art Bulletin, 81: 2, 1999, 215–35;
Cristóbal Colón: Antigüedades mexicanas, Mexico, 1892. Fundamental to my
‘Salt, composition, and the goldsmith’s intelligence’, in Cellini and the
own work on the Lienzo is Travis Barton Kranz, The Tlaxcalan Conquest
Principles of Sculpture, Cambridge, 2002, 15–42; ‘Perpetual exorcism in
Pictorials: The Role of Images in Influencing Colonial Policy in Sixteenth-Century
Sistine Rome’, in Michael W. Cole and Rebecca E. Zorach, eds, The Idol
Mexico, PhD Dissertation, Department of Art History, University
in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World, Burlington, VT,
of California Los Angeles, 2001; see also her ‘Visual persuasion:
2009, 57–75.
Sixteenth-century Tlaxcalan pictorials in response to the ‘Conquest
6 Jennifer Roberts, ‘Copley’s cargo: Boy with a Squirrel and the dilemma of
of Mexico’’, in Susan Schroeder, ed., The Conquest All Over Again:
transit’, American Art, 21: 2, 2007, 241.
Nahuas and Zapotecs Thinking, Writing, and Painting Spanish Colonialism,
7 William Bullein, Bulleins Bulwarke of defence againste all Sicknes, Sornes, and
Eastbourne, 2010, 41–73. Other studies of indigenous accounts of the
Woundes…, London, 1562, 53r; bracketed clarifications added from
‘Conquest of Mexico’ include Viola König, Die Schlacht bei Sieben Blume:
the text of the 1579 edition: William Bullein, Bvlleins Bulwarke of Defence
Konquistadoren, Kaziken und Konflickte auf alten Landkarten der Indianer Südmexikos,
against all Sicknesse, Soarenesse, and VVoundes…, London, 1579, 50r.
Bremen, 1993; Florine Asselbergs, Conquered Conquistadors: The Lienzo de
8 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
Quauhquechollan: A Nahua Vision of the Conquest of Guatemala, Boulder, CO,
(1966), New York, 1970, 17–45.
2004; Laura E. Matthew and Michel R. Oudijk, eds, Indian Conquistadors:

9 Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (1984), Cambridge, MA, 1988, 32 Boone, Cycles, 190–2.
68–70, 164–74, 189; John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan, Represented 33 Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Inquisición, Libro 37,
Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization, Chicago, IL, 2001, 57. Expediente 3, 21v.
10 As in Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and 34 On this scene, see Gordon Brotherston, The Book of the Fourth World:
France (1924), London, 1973. Reading the Native Americas through their Literature, Cambridge, 1992, 92–3;
11 This kind of zooming is also simulated onscreen in the digitally Diana Magaloni Kerpel, ‘Imágenes de la conquista de México en
recreated Lienzo – although my own experiments with recreating the los códices del siglo XVI’, Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 82,
spatial experience of Mesoamerican documents in the late 1990s were 2003, 28–9; Federico Navarrete, ‘Beheadings and massacres: Andean
originally pursued on paper with miniaturizing photocopies and and Mesoamerican representations of the Spanish conquest’, Res:
printouts. Anthropology and Aesthetics, 53/54, 2008, 67.
12 This formal-visual strategy is a very different kind of object-inspired 35 The Codex Vienna is another example of a Mesoamerican written
writing from the voice-ventriloquism proposed by Lorraine Daston document conceptualized as a sacred bundle, with its most important
(‘Speechless’, in Lorraine Daston, ed., Things that Talk: Object Lessons from images located at the very centre of zig-zagging folds; see Hamann,
Art and Science, New York, 2004, 11). ‘“In the eyes of the Mixtecs”’, 100–1.
13 John Monaghan and Byron Hamann, ‘Reading as social practice and 36 Byron Hamann, ‘The social life of pre-sunrise things: Indigenous
cultural construction’, Indiana Journal of Hispanic Literatures, 13, Fall 1998, Mesoamerican archaeology’, Current Anthropology, 43, 2002, 351–82.
131–40. 37 Gibson, Tlaxcala, 158–62. New Spain was not a colony, but rather
14 Charles Gibson, Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century, New Haven, CT, 1952, – like Sardinia, Sicily, and Naples – an extra-Iberian viceroyalty
164–70; Howard Cline, ‘Hernando Cortés and the Aztec Indians in ruled from Madrid. I use ‘viceregal’ in this essay instead of the more
Spain’, Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, 26, April 1969, 70–90. commonplace, but misleading, ‘colonial’.
15 James Lockhart, Frances Berdan and Arthur J. O. Anderson, The 38 Monaghan and Hamann, ‘Reading’.
Tlaxcalan Actas: A Compendium of the Records of the Cabildo of Tlaxcala (1545– 39 Barbara Tedlock and Dennis Tedlock, ‘Text and textile: Language
1627), Salt Lake City, UT, 1986, 51. and technology in the arts of the Quiché Maya’, Journal of Anthropological
16 Gibson, Tlaxcala, 165–8. Research, 41, 1986, 128; Dennis Tedlock, Popol Vuh, 2nd edition, New
17 Gibson, Tlaxcala, 165. York, 1996, 21, 192, 218.
18 Helen Nader, Liberty in Absolutist Spain: The Habsburg Sale of Towns 1516–1700, 40 Mercedes Montes de Oca Vega, ‘Los disfrasismos en el náhuatl, un
Baltimore, MD, 1990; Jovita Baber, The Construction of Empire: Politics, problema de traducción o de conceptualización’, Amerindia, 22, 1997,
Law, and Community in Tlaxcala, New Spain, 1521–1640, PhD Dissertation, 31–44.
Department of History, University of Chicago, 2005, 107–10. 41 Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of
19 Nicolás Faustino Mazihcatzin y Calmecahua, ‘Descripción del Lienzo New Spain, Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, eds and trans,
de Tlaxcala (1787)’, Revista Mexicana de Estudios Históricos, 1: 2, 1927, 59–85. (1547–79), Salt Lake City, UT, and Santa Fe, NM, 1950–82, vol. 5, 152.
20 Chavero, Homenaje, v: ‘Quedó, pues, perdido el lienzo; pero por 42 J. Richard Andrews and Ross Hassig, eds and trans, Treatise on the Heathen
fortuna yo tengo copia exatísima, dibujada con toda escrupulosidad, y Superstitions that Today Live Among the Indians Native to this New Spain, 1629,
para la cual se hicieron colores enteramente iguales á los del original. Norman, OK, 1984, 153–5.
Como también tengo los calcos que del mismo original se sacaron, 43 Sahagún, Florentine Codex, vol. 11, 181.
hoy puede hacerce una reproducción fidelísima del lienzo perdido.’ 44 Serge Gruzinski, Painting the Conquest: The Mexican Indians and the European
21 On this Exposición, see Barbara Mundy and Dana Leibsohn, ‘Of Renaissance, Paris, 1992, 15–18.
copies, casts, and codices: Mexico on display in 1892’, Res: Anthropology 45 Gruzinski, Painting, 15–18; Monaghan and Hamann, ‘Reading’.
and Aesthetics, 29/30, Spring/Autumn 1996, 326–43. 46 On (in)visibility in Central Mexican aesthetics, see Esther Pasztory,
22 Lienzo de Tlaxcala, Mexico, 1939; Lienzo de Tlaxcala, Mexico, 1983. Aztec Art, New York, 1983, 89–90; Dana Leibsohn, ‘Seeing in-situ:
23 Again – and most tellingly – such reassembly was not even Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2’, in Davíd Carrasco and Scott Sessions,
undertaken for the 1892 Exposición. The historical silence on eds, Cave, City and Eagles’ Nest: An Interpretive Journey through Mapa de
collaged reconstructions of the Lienzo stands in contrast to the well- Cuauhtinchan No 2, Albuquerque, NM, 2007, 389–426.
documented practice of cutting up spine-bound copies of the Dover 47 Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Inquisición, Libro 42,
edition of the Codex Nuttall in order to recreate the original screenfold 148v and 149r.
format; see Byron Ellsworth Hamann, ‘“In the eyes of the Mixtecs 48 Sahagún, Florentine Codex, vol. 8, 18.
/ to view several pages simultaneously”: Seeing and the Mixtec 49 On Orion and origins in Mesoamerican thought, see David Freidel,
screenfolds’, Visible Language, 38: 1, 2004, 68–123. Linda Schele and Joy Parker, Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the
24 These other sources are a poster-format reproduction of the Shaman’s Path, New York, 1993. On drilling fire and new cycles of time,
eighteenth-century copy, published by Papel y Cartón de México in see Byron Ellsworth Hamann, ‘Chronological pollution: Potsherds,
1983; and a facsimile of Diego Muñoz Camargo’s Descripción de la ciudad mosques, and broken gods before and after the conquest of Mexico’,
y provincia de Tlaxcala (René Acuña, ed., México, 1981). Muñoz Camargo Current Anthropology, 49: 5, 2008, 803–36.
made copies of all of the Lienzo’s cells as part of the illustrated section of 50 Marshall H. Saville, Turqois Mosaic Art in Ancient Mexico, New York, 1922.
his text. 51 Janet F. Steele and Ralph Snavely, ‘Cueva Cheve tablet’, Journal of Cave and
25 More than one twenty-first-century researcher has been fooled by the Karst Studies, 59: 1, 1997, 26–32.
Homenaje lithographs into thinking the Lienzo contained only twelve 52 Federico Navarrete, ‘La Malinche, la Virgen y la montaña: el juego
rows of cells. de la identidad en los códices tlaxcaltecas’, História (São Paulo), 26: 2,
26 Byron Ellsworth Hamann, ‘Drawing glyphs together’, in Joanne 2007, 295–305.
Pillsbury, ed., Past Presented: Archaeological Illustration and the Ancient Americas, 53 On Mary and the saints as Christian abogados and abogadas, see William
Washington, DC, 2011, 230–81. Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, Princeton, NJ, 1981, 55.
27 Elizabeth Hill Boone, Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate, 54 Navarrete, ‘La Malinche’, 11–15.
Austin, TX, 2007, 222–5. 55 Jeanette Favrot Peterson, ‘The Florentine Codex imagery and the
28 Boone, Cycles, 84–156. colonial Tlacuilo’, in J. Jorge Klor de Alva, H.B. Nicholson and Eloise
29 Hernán Cortés, Letters from Mexico, New Haven, CT, 1986, 139–42. Quiñones Keber, eds, The Work of Bernardino de Sahagún: Pioneer Ethnographer
30 On the captured battle standard mentioned by Cortés, see also Patricia of Sixteenth-Century Aztec Mexico, Albany, NY, 1988, 287–8.
Anawalt, ‘A comparative analysis of the costumes and accoutrements 56 Leibsohn, ‘Seeing’.
of the Codex Mendoza’, in Frances F. Berdan, and Patricia Rieff Anawalt, 57 Saville, Turquois; Karl A. Taube, ‘The iconography of mirrors at
eds, The Codex Mendoza, Berkeley, CA, 1992, vol. 1, 112–13. Teotihuacan’, in Janet Berlo, ed., Art, Ideology, and the City of Teotihuacan,
31 Werner Stenzel, ‘The sacred bundles in Mesoamerican religion’, Washington, DC, 1992, 69–204; Karl A. Taube, ‘The turquoise hearth:
Proceedings of the 38th International Congress of Americanists, Stuttgart-Munich, Fire, self sacrifice, and the Central Mexican cult of war’, in Davíd
12–18 August 1968, 1970, Vol. 2, 347–52. Carrasco, Lindsay Jones and Scott Sessions, eds, Mesoamerica’s Classic

Heritage: From Teotihuacan to the Aztecs, Boulder, CO, 2000, 269–340.

58 On the Texas Fragment, see Kranz, The Tlaxcalan Conquest.
59 Taube, ‘Iconography’, 192.
60 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, Oxford, 1998, 83–90.
61 Gell, ‘The enchantment’, 44–6.
62 Gell, Art.
63 Alfred Gell, ‘Vogel’s net: Traps as artworks and artworks as traps’, in
The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams, Eric Hirsch, ed., London, 1999,
187–214.
64 Kranz, Tlaxcalan, 205–6.
65 Walter Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical
reproduction’, in Illuminations, Harry Zohn, trans, New York, 1968,
237.
66 The reconstituted Lienzo ultimately exists as binary code, a ‘digital
diagram’ analogous to Nelson Goodman’s scores and blueprints:
Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, Indianapolis, IN, 1968,
112–23, 192–201, 218–21.
67 Stephen Houston, ‘Literacy among the pre-Columbian Maya: A
comparative perspective’, in Walter D. Mignolo and Elizabeth Hill
Boone, eds, Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and
the Andes, Durham, NC, 1994, 27–49; John Monaghan, ‘Performance
and the structure of the Mixtec codices’, Ancient Mesoamerica, 1, 1990,
133–40.
68 James Lockhart, ‘Sightings: Initial Nahua reactions to Spanish culture’,
in Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and
Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern
Era, Cambridge, 1994, 218–48.
69 Hamann, ‘“In the eyes of the Mixtecs”’, 95.
70 Cortés, Letters, 366–7.
71 Alonso de Molina, Aqui comiença un vocabulario en la lengua castellana y
mexicana, Mexico, 1555, 36v.
72 Bruce Sterling, ‘The brief but glorious life of Web 2.0, and what comes
after’, http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2009/03/what-
bruce-ster/
73 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Cyberspace, virtuality, and the real’, in Architecture
from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, Cambridge, MA, 2001, 79.
74 Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the
Virtually Human, Princeton, NJ, 2008, 249. Other studies usefully
contextualize breathless talk about digital revolutions within a longer
history of technofetishist rhetoric: Vincent Mosco, The Digital Sublime:
Myth, Power, and Cyberspace, Cambridge, MA, 2004; Lisa Gitelman, Always
Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture, Cambridge, MA, 2006.

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Object, Image, Cleverness:

The Lienzo de Tlaxcala

© Association of Art Historians 2013 519

Lienzo de Tlaxcala investigates the complicated interplay of iconography and materiality

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1562, 1862, 1892

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3 Exposición. The Unclever Object

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were mounted edge-to-edge, uncropped, in an eleven by five layout. In other

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As conquest warfare raged in the streets and plazas of Tenochtitlan, four

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11 Ixtli. homology.56 Shining surfaces were ‘eye-catching’ or ‘eye-popping’ things. They

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easier to defend in viceregal courtrooms). The Lienzo’s shield-like structure underlined

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The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

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Notes Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica, Norman, OK, 2008.

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Heritage: From Teotihuacan to the Aztecs, Boulder, CO, 2000, 269–340.

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