David horacio colmenares
Assistant Professor of Spanish, Boston University
dhc122@columbia.edu, dhcg@bu.edu
Upon the asp and the basilisk: Infra-politics and Hernán Cortés’s map of Tenochtitlan
Abstract:
The Praeclara de Nova Maris oceani Hyspania narratio, the Latin edition of Hernán Cortés’s Second and Third Letters to Charles V (Nuremberg, 1524), included a famous map of the Mexica city of Tenochtitlan as it stood on the eve of its fall. At the center of the sacred precinct, recognizable by the twin temples and skull racks, a monumental beheaded figure seems to preside over the composition. Following recent scholarship that has emphasized the heraldic and emblematic aspects of the Praeclara as a whole, over the strictly cartographic or representational elements of the map, in this presentation I will propose a political iconology of the “stone idol” at the heart of Tenochtitlan. As I will try to show, this small image, sitting at the crossroads of two opposing pictorial regimes—figurative referentiality and heraldric schematism—conveys an equally ambiguous political message. Through a visual analysis of the image’s genealogy, in which Aztec and Mediterranean patterns converge, I argue that the map in the Praeclara presents the Emperor with an polymorphous view on the substance of his own power over the new lands: a substance that forms the basis of his sovereignty, but remains forever distinct from it.
David Horacio Colmenares, Assistant Professor of Spanish at Boston University, is a specialist in the intersections of early modern Iberian antiquarianism, Mesoamerican studies, and visual and material cultural studies. He earned his PhD from the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University in the City of New York, and also holds an MA in Philosophy from KU Leuven in Belgium. His research has been supported by the Kunsthistorisches Institut – Max-Planck-Institut (Florence - Berlin), the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island, and Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C. At Boston University, he teaches courses on literary, visual and cultural studies, with a focus on the intersections of early modern Iberia and Mesoamerica. His current book project, entitled Taming Teotl, proposes an hermeneutical history of Nahua deities by studying the definition and codification of a Mexican pantheon in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.