Abstract
Christoph Weiditz's Trachtenbuch (costume book) of c. 1529–1530 pictures the dress, physical characteristics, and activities of people of varied social ranks and occupations from different regions of the Netherlands and Spain, including the Aztecs who accompanied Hernando Cortés to Spain in 1528 and joined the court of Charles V. Responding to the intense European interest in regional dress, Weiditz's thirteen paintings of indigenous Americans offered what has long been considered an eyewitness account of the Aztecs. This essay argues that although some were Mexicans, all were Brazilianized, and most were rendered as exotics on display, with physical and sartorial features fabricated from prints, descriptions, and objects representing the Americas that were circulating in Europe at the time. The dissonance between Weiditz's painted images and the Mexicans who visited Charles's court, points up how difficult it was for Weiditz and the European public to recognize real ethnic, cultural, and social distinctions among indigenous peoples and, to the contrary, how easily diverse objects and images from the American were entangled to compose a generic Indianness.
Notes on contributor
Elizabeth Hill Boone holds the Martha and Donald Robertson Chair in Latin American Art at Tulane University. She has written extensively on the painted books of Preconquest and early colonial Mexico as well as pictographic and other non-language writing systems. Her interests also include the ideology and visual expression of Aztec Mexico. Her current project examines changes in the indigenous tradition of pictography and manuscript painting after the conquest.
Notes
1. For ease of reference, I use the names of the modern nation states to designate the various regions.
2. I use the term Aztec inclusively to refer to the Nahua-speaking peoples of central Mexico who shared a culture and ideology and who were conquered by or allied with Cortés; these include the Tenochca-Mexica, Texcocans, Tlaxcallans, and others whose envoys traveled with Cortés to Spain.
7. Hampe Citation1994, 8–10. Casado Soto (Citation2001, 58–60) proposed an itinerary that includes most of the regions whose people are pictured, but this extended route still does not account for the English and Irish costumes. Weiditz had to have amplified this collection with costumes previously documented by others.
8. Hampe (Citation1994, 26) and Casado Soto (Citation2001, 50) note that glosses accompanying the portraits of Cortés and the admiral Andrea Doria allude to events after 1530. According to Hampe (Citation1994, 9) some of the annotations exhibit ‘serious orthographic and syntactical mistakes,’ and others ‘are completely corrupted and at times hardly understandable.’ He suggests that the accuracy of the annotations was not ‘taken too seriously in those days.’
9. The current binding is late eighteenth century; the title trachtenbuch was first used when it was given to the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremburg in 1886. Hampe Citation1994, 6, 22; Casado Soto Citation2001, 49. The pagination probably dates from this time as well.
10. The view of Weiditz's work as an ethnography has been taken by Casado Soto (Citation2001, 7–8), but especially advanced by Briesemeister (Citation2006) and Satterfield (Citation2007).
11. The unpublished costume book of Sigmund Heldt, compiled of nearly 900 renderings c. 1560–1580, contains many of the same figures (the Amerindians are on pp. 370r–74v). Some may not derive directly from Weiditz but from a prototype used by both (Casado Soto Citation2001, 103, 104; Rublack Citation2007, 276–82; Wilson Citation2005, 116). A copy of Weiditz's Trachtenbuch, dated c. 1600, is Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cod.icon 342 (the Amerindians are on pp. 3v–9v). This library also contains a late seventeenth-century compilation, Cod.icon. 361, that includes a number of Weiditz's images (the Amerindians are on pp. 25r–26v), as well as some of Pliny's monstrous races (pp. 22r–23v). Briesemeister (Citation2006, 12–13) mentions a few others. Many of Weiditz's costume figures reappear with others in Weigel's popular costume book of 1577.
12. Labeled ‘In such manner the Indians play with a blown-up ball with the seat without moving their hands from the ground; they have also a hard leather before their seat in order that it shall receive the blow from the ball, they have also such leather gloves on’ (Hampe Citation1994, 28).
13. Labeled respectively, ‘This is an Indian, he lies on his back and throws a block of wood around on his heels, is as long as a man and as heavy, he has on the earth a leather under him, is as big as a calf skin’; ‘Thus he throws the wood above him with his feet’; ‘Thus he again catches the wood on his feet as he has thrown it up’ (Hampe Citation1994, 28).
14. Sheets 3 and 5 are glossed, ‘This is also an Indian man,’ and ‘This is also the Indian manner, how they have brought wood jugs with them out of which they drink’ (Hampe Citation1994, 29).
15. The gloss reads, ‘In this manner the Indian women go. Not more than one of them has come out [to Europe]’ (Hampe Citation1994, 28).
17. Aztec dress has been extensively documented by Anawalt Citation1981.
19. Briesemeister (Citation2006, 7) cites Pietschmann (Citation2005, xvii–xviii n.4) as saying that an unnamed colleague from Mexico thought Weiditz's jeweled Amerindians were probably Matlatzincans because of their ‘facial tattoos.’ The ornaments on their faces are not tattoos, however, and there is no evidence the Matlatzincans had such multiple facial jewels.
20. Hampe (Citation1994, 27–30) notes the absence of some of these feathers in Heldt's book.
21. Oviedo y Valdés 1851–1855, 3:527–28; López de Gómara Citation1943, 2:184–86; and Herrera y Tordesillas 1934–1957, 8, 181 [decade 4, bk. 3, ch. 8] describe the entourage. Cline (Citation1969) discusses it in detail. Cortés had previously gathered a diverse entourage of nobles and entertainers, whom he took with him on his journey to Honduras.
22. Aztec clothing is well known by means of written descriptions and pictorial manuscripts painted after the conquest, examined in detail in Anawalt Citation1981. See Anawalt Citation1981, 22, 27–32 for the tilmatl.
23. The paintings of the lords seem to be associated with Pomar's Relación of 1582 but not actually a part of it. They are linked to it because the painter of this lord (Nezahualpilli) also rendered the image of the deity Tlaloc in the Relación (first noted by Robertson Citation1959, 150). The Relación, however, does not refer directly to any of the paintings of the lords, although it does refer specifically to eight other illustrations. The lords are individually named by glosses in the hand of Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, a descendent of the lords of Texcoco who copied Pomar's Relacion. For Pomar's Relación, its images, and the representations of the four lords, see Acuña Citation1986, esp. 31–32, 42–44; Durand Forest Citation1976, 14, 29–31; and Doesberg Citation1996, 17–30.
25. For gifts of clothing by the Hapsburg court to Aztecs and others, and the expense of doing so, see Johnson (Citation2011, 83–90). Hayward (Citation2004, 166, 171–76) examines gifts of clothing as an informal but costly part of Henry VIII's system of patronage; Henry also received gifts of clothing from Frances I. Jones and Stallybrass (Citation2000, 5, 18–26) discuss the social signification of gifts of clothes more broadly.
26. One of the wise men in an Adoration of the Magi painting of c. 1505 wears a radial crown of feathers and a feathered collar and belt, and holds a Tupinambá arrow, all accurately rendered (Honour Citation1975a, no. 4). Tupinambá feathered capes dating to the sixteenth century are found in several old European collections; complete list in Buono Citation2007, 128–33.
27. I draw here on the analyses by Honour (Citation1975b, 12–13), who translates the four-line text (Citation1979, 271–72; Sturtevant Citation1992, 27; Massing Citation1991, 516; Mason Citation1998, 17–18; and Leitch Citation2010, 63). Honour (Citation1979, 277) sees the feathered skirt as a fabrication; Sturtevant (Citation1976, 420) originally thought so also but later proposed that ‘they can be considered rare variants of the belts made of shorter feathers that are among the Tupinambá objects in Copenhagen’ (Citation1992, 27). The other 1505 broadsheet, printed in Leipzig, is published in Leitch Citation2010, 145.
32. A sixteenth-century costume book (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cod.icon 342), copied for the most part from Weiditz, includes a man labeled as being from Calicut who wears only a loincloth, a tall cylindrical feathered headdress, and feathers around his ankles like those worn by two of Weiditz's log jugglers (13r). Feest (Citation2014, 299) publishes and discusses a woodcut of a ‘nobleman of Calicut’ whose entire body is studded with jewels and who wears a cape, skirt, headdress, and arm and leg bands all of feathers.
33. Described by Cortés Citation1986, 39–46; López de Gómara Citation1943, 1:138–42; Martyr d’Anghiera 1912, 2:45–48. The literature on the circulation of Mexican works is great but is dominated by the studies of Nowotny Citation1960, Feest Citation1990, and Heikamp Citation1972. See Keating and Markey (Citation2011) for a more recent analysis and a more complete bibliography.
35. E.g. Deserps Citation2001, 138, 139; Weigel Citation1577, pls. 181–83. Weiditz's image of the Indian woman was the only one of his Amerindian collection to live on in Weigel's costume book and others thereafter, where she is labeled simply as an Indian woman, although Weigel identifies two figures in Brazilian dress as from Brazil.
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