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The Dominicans as Conveyors of Mesoamerican Objects to Italy and Europelocked

The Dominicans as Conveyors of Mesoamerican Objects to Italy and Europelocked

  • Davide DomeniciDavide DomeniciDepartment of History and Cultures, University of Bologna

Summary

It has been customary to trace back to the early shipments sent by the Spanish conquistadors most of the Mesoamerican artefacts held in ancient European collections. Early 21st-century scholarship, however, has demonstrated that Dominican friars such as Domingo de Betanzos (1480–1549) had a key role in bringing indigenous objects from Mexico to Italy during the 16th century. This new understanding allows a rethinking of the ideological motivations that ignited the transatlantic circulation of indigenous artefacts; textual analysis of relevant sources, in fact, reveals that they were observed and understood within a missionary discourse on indigenous ingenuity, rationality, and convertibility.

Once in Italy, the objects entered local art collections in Bologna, Rome, Florence, and other Italian cities, where they aroused an antiquarian approach to their study. The investigation of the collection history of these objects, which in some instances ended up in museums in other European countries, shows that our knowledge of many of the most iconic Mesoamerican artworks known today can be traced back to the actions of the Dominican friars.

Keywords

Subjects

  • History of Mexico
  • 1492–1824

The Arrival of Mesoamerican Objects in Early Modern Europe

During the early Spanish explorations of Mexico and in the aftermath of the conquest of the Aztec Empire, several loads of indigenous artefacts were shipped to Spain, Peru, and even to South Asian locations, such as the Moluccas. These objects were mainly sent as gifts, as payments of the Royal Fifth, and as tokens of the richness of the newly conquered lands, tangible promises of a still nonexistent, global commercial space that conquistadors such as Hernán Cortés were keen to create.1 Recorded in a series of detailed inventories, several shipments arrived in Spain where they were admired by monarchs, courtly officials, ambassadors, churchmen, and artists, and were even publicly exhibited in Valladolid and Brussels in 1520. The texts recording the amazement of these European observers soon became so famous that they strongly contributed to shaping European ideas about Mesoamerican indigenous civilizations.2

Unfortunately, most of the objects sent to Spain and the Hapsburg domains were subsequently lost or destroyed, so that few of the extant ones can be traced back to the shipments of the conquistadors.3 Despite this fact, the fascination caused by the detailed inventories and descriptions of the conquistadors’ shipments had such an enduring effect that from the beginning of the 20th century it has been almost customary to trace back to those shipments most of the Mesoamerican artefacts proceeding from ancient European collections. This is especially true for the (relatively) abundant corpus of painted manuscripts, mosaic-encrusted objects, and other artefacts that surfaced in 16th-century collections in Italian cities such as Rome, Florence, Venice, and Bologna. Discussing the corpus of Mesoamerican turquoise mosaics held in early European collections (most of them from Italian collections), for example, in 1906 Walter Lehmann stated that

Fortunately, a very special circumstance has kept us a fairly large number of the most valuable pieces of such mosaic work, some of which belong to Motecuzoma’s gifts to Cortés, while others may even be traced back to the Juan de Grijalva’s expedition.4

Since then, and despite the lack of any secure documental evidence, this idea was repeated again and again, becoming an almost universally accepted truth.

Indeed, there are only two historically attested instances that could account for an Iberian origin of Mesoamerican objects held in Italian collections. The first one is known thanks to a Latin manuscript note that Johann Albrecht Widmanstetter traced between 1537 and 1557 on Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus 1, stating that the manuscript from “South India” had been given, together with some bells and a featherwork mantle, to Clement VII by Manuel I, King of Portugal. Since Manuel I died in December 1521—a few months after the conquest of the Aztec capital Mexico-Tenochtitlan—the note would imply that the Mixtec codex would have reached the hands of the (then still not Pope) Giulio de Medici at a surprisingly early date.5 Zelia Nuttall advanced the hypothesis that the codex, together with the Mixtec Codex Zouche-Nuttall, must have been part of Cortés’s first shipment (1519).6 Other scholars later proposed that it could have been part of Cortés’s second shipment (1521) and that Manuel I could have obtained it through his wife Eleonora, sister of Emperor Charles V (King of Spain as Charles I).7 Equally problematic is the fact that Codex Vindobonensis proceeds from the Mixteca Alta region, where the first Spanish raid was carried out in the very year of 1521; to explain this surprising fact, Detlef Heikamp speculated that the manuscript could have been found in one of the Mixtec settlements on the Gulf Coast of Mexico.8 Observing all these incongruences, Eric Thompson argued that Widmanstetter could have erroneously attributed the “South Indian” Codex Vindobonensis to Manuel I because he had indeed given a Roman Pope (Leone X) a rich gift of East Indian objects in 1514.9 If Thompson was right, Codex Vindobonensis must have reached the hands of Clement VII on another, unknown occasion.

The second instance is recorded in Bernal Díaz’s Historia verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España: a few days after having been awarded the Marquesado of the Valley of Oaxaca (1529), Hernán Cortés

sent to Rome, to kiss the holy feet of our holy father Pope Clement . . . , as his ambassador a gentleman named Juan de Herrada, with a rich present of precious stones and golden jewels. . . . [A]nd what I am saying I knew from Juan de Herrada himself, when he came from Rome to New Spain. . . . [He] gave the gifts sent by Cortés . . . , which His Holiness held in much esteem. . . .10

Unfortunately, neither Bernal Díaz nor other persons who attended the event—such as Paolo Giovio—provided any detail about the objects that Juan de Herrada (or de Rada) had brought to Rome.

The Dominican Gifts

The reconsideration of previously unnoticed historical sources provides new data that account for the presence of Mesoamerican objects in early modern Italian collections, due to Dominican missionaries who visited Italy from Mexico during the 16th century.

The Dominican historian Leandro Alberti recorded in his Historie di Bologna that a Dominican friar named “Domingo,” coming from “the New Indies” met Clement VII in Bologna on March 3, 1533, in the aftermath of the so-called “second meeting” between the Pope and Charles V.11 On that occasion, the friar offered the Pope a rich gift including, among “many other similar objects,” featherwork attires of native priests, painted manuscripts, turquoise-covered masks, a large sacrificial knife with mosaic-covered handle, smaller knives with obsidian blades, and a chalcedony sculpture in the form of a hill surmounted by a cross.12 Further research identified the friar as Domingo de Betanzos (1480–1549), who travelled to Italy to obtain the independence of the Dominican province of Mexico.13 Betanzos’s voyage was recorded by various Dominican chroniclers, foremost among them Agustín Dávila Padilla, who also described a previous meeting with Pope Clement VII which took place in Rome in 1532; on that first occasion, Betanzos also offered a gift of “things of the land,” taken from native “idols” and given to him by “the Province”: featherwork images and costumes, medicinal stones, a headdress with turquoise and “emeralds” (jade), and sacrificial knives.14 The relevance of Betanzos’s gifts is obvious: apart from including categories of objects such as those held in early modern Italian collections, the fact that they were offered in Rome and Bologna to a member of the Florentine Medici family neatly matches the geographical distribution of Mesoamerican artefacts in Italy, mostly held in Rome, Bologna, and Florence.

Another similar event is witnessed by an anonymous and undated text, titled Descrittione dell’India occidentale, probably written and printed in Venice in the third quarter of the 16th century.15 This source describes the arrival, arguably in Rome, of a priest who had been active among Zapotec and Mixtec indigenous groups, thus suggesting that he was a Dominican. This priest, who has been tentatively identified with Juan de Córdova, brought with him a series of objects which he had taken from the Mixtec king of Tututepec: a skull of a sacrificed enemy king, cut as a “cup” and covered by turquoise mosaic, a bone from the same individual transformed into a musical instrument, a turquoise mosaic-covered idol, various other idols of chalcedony, sacrificial knives, obsidian blades, weapons, clothes, copper axe-monies, tools, and featherwork mosaics with Christian imagery.

The two events described by Alberti, Dávila Padilla, and the Descrittione are, by far, the best documented instances in which Mesoamerican artefacts reached the Italian peninsula during the 16th century, in both cases involving Dominican missionaries and thus implying a quite radical rethinking of the ideological framework in which an important share of the transatlantic circulation of indigenous objects took place. Rather than in the dreams of wealth and prestige that framed the shipments of the early conquistadors, the motivations that drove the arrival and reception of Mesoamerican artefacts in early modern Italy seem to lie within a specific missionary discourse.

Ingenium, Humanity and the Politics of Christian Colonialism

The analysis of the sources describing the indigenous artefacts brought to Italy sheds light on the reasons why Dominican missionaries engaged in the eradication of “idolatry” decided to bring “idolatrous” objects to the very heart of Catholic Christendom.16 On one hand, they were understood as tangible evidences of indigenous idolatry, as attested by the recurrent mentions of “idols,” sacrificial practices, and devilish cults. According to Dávila Padilla, Betanzos brought “some tools that the idolaters used to sacrifice men to the devil.”17 Alberti stated that through the masks “the demons were speaking to those peoples.”18 The anonymous author of the Descrittione, besides continuously employing the term “idol” (twenty-one occurrences in the brief, eight pages of text), also described sacrificial and anthropophagic practices in a rather gruesome way:

“they sacrificed him alive in the temple, & cutting his head they made it into a cup”; “they ate the flesh, & they burned the entrails”. . . . “The priest used to slide these knives under the left breast of the living victim, & putting the hand inside he took out the heart, & with the palpitating heart he anointed the face of the idol, & this was their way of sacrificing.”19

On the other hand, the same texts stress the functionality and technical qualities of the artefacts. Painted books, for example, rather than being unfavorably compared with Western writing systems—as it became common in the late 16th and 17th century—are praised, since through them “they understand each other as we do by letters.”20 Their “characters were useful to them as the letters in our books are useful to us to preserve the memory of the events.”21 Similarly, axe-monies, cacao seeds, and cotton clothes are described as “money” and “very useful commodit[ies],” whose economic value is given by means of veritable exchange rates with coeval Italian currencies.22 Indigenous customs are also praised for their morality, since men use breechcloths to “cover their shameful parts” and women wear a chemise that “is closed on the front for honesty.”23

The technical and aesthetic qualities of the artefacts, as well as their appreciation by European observers, are repeatedly praised, since they were “beautiful and rare things,” “worth seeing,” “extremely precious and hard to craft.”24 Painted indigenous books are said to be “nicely painted,” a sculpture is “very nicely worked,” and the objects presented to the Pope “very much pleased him and his retainers.”25 Obsidian prismatic blades are described as “very shiny and showy.”26 They “cut like razors,” “as they were of fine steel.”27 Much attention is paid to featherworks, which are described as “very well worked, not only cheerful in appearance but also delightful for their composition, and all these little feathers having been arranged one by one created a marvelous and well-made work” . . . “What delighted the Pontiff and the Cardinals even more was a marvelously worked feather miter, which belonged to an idols’ priest.”28 According to Alberti, they “looked like velvet” and were “graciously worked,” while according to the Descrittione they were “marvelously & delicately worked by the same Indians.”29

The appreciation of indigenous craftsmanship led to unexpected comparisons and interpretations, as when Alberti states that the act of looking at featherworks “seems to recognize what is said in the Scriptures about the God’s shrine which is recommended to be embellished with feather materials,” or when obsidian blades are understood as circumcision tools: “By these knives we knew the kind of those knives of which the Bible speaks when the Lord says: ‘Make me the stone knives to circumcise.’”30 Similarly, the Descrittione mentions “an ebony tablet, two fingers-wide and one span-long, & on the lower side it has a black porphyry razor, & with that tablet they used to circumcise,” “as the Jews used to do.”31

The analogy with Jewish customs conceptually located indigenous people on a specific point along the path to Salvation: still not Christian, they were nonetheless perceived as civilized peoples with the potential to be fully Christianized. In the Descrittione, this intellectual potential is discursively centered on the notion of ingenio, a term which is poorly translatable in English as “genius,” “ingeniousness,” or “ingenuity.” Indeed, in neo-Latin languages, the terms deriving from the Latin ingenium were and are still used to refer both to a mechanically complex artefact and to an intellectual quality. In the former sense, for example, the Italian term ingegno is employed in the Descrittione to refer to a flintknapping tool used to produce obsidian blades (“a wooden ingegno”), to the aforementioned “circumcision” tablet (“a certain wooden ingegno”), as well as to copper tools (“copper ingegni”). This usage, and especially its association with the flintknapping tool, reveals the hidden ideological referent of the text. Indeed, in the Apologética historia sumaria, the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas had described the usage of the very same flintknapping tool, stating that “the fact that they devised such an art is no small argument in favor of the liveliness of the genius [viveza de los ingenios] of the men that devised such a working method.”32 According to Las Casas, native craftsmen were so skilled that “if they wanted to represent a natural thing, it seemed natural, by means of which they demonstrated the subtlety of their genius [sotileza de sus ingenios].” Not surprisingly, featherworks are among the most clear evidences of native ingenio:

What surely exceeds every human genius [ingenio], and what would be more new than rare to every nation of the world—and should be admired and esteemed so much—is the craft and art that those Mexican people know how to work well and perfectly: that is, arranging natural feathers with their natural colors in every way, as any excellent and very good painter could paint with brushes.33

The ideological aim of these statements becomes clear when Las Casas states that all these works

cannot be done or even imagined without a great and admirable genius [ingenio] and judgment. So that nobody who has a brain could dare think, or even suppose, that all these people are not very ingenious [ingeniosísimas] and of great and notable understanding, because it is known that we used to say that in these matters the artwork praises the artisan or craftsman. . . . And the good handmade works offer clear proof of good genius [buenos ingenios] and understanding, as one can see in all the mechanical arts.34

Thus, in Las Casas’s discourse, ingenio is the base of his defense of indigenous’ rationality, of their convertibility and, ultimately, of their full humanity. The relevance of the notion of ingenio in the debate is also witnessed by the fact that the very same notion was explicitly mentioned by Las Casas’s opponent, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. Defending Aristotle’s theory on natural slavery—which was based on the idea that barbarians had an impio et pessimo ingenio, according to Las Casas’s phrasing of Aristotelian theory35—Sepúlveda stressed that

Although some of them show a certain ingenuity [ingeniosi esse videntur] in various works of artisanship, this offers no proof of human cleverness, for we can observe animals, birds, and spiders making certain structures which no human accomplishment could competently imitate.36

In light of these observations, it is not surprising that for the author of the Descrittione—who obviously knew Las Casas’s work—the best evidences of Amerindians’ ingegno were the featherworks with Christian imagery, clear testimonies of the success of the transformative will underlying the missionary project:

some images of God & the Apostles were also brought, made of very fine feathers, of different kinds of birds, marvelously & delicately worked by the same Indians, by means of which we can recognize their very lively & sharp ingenuity [vivissimo & acuto ingegno] in the arts, & human crafts.37

It is important to consider that the term ingenio also recurs in non-Dominican texts describing objects from the New World. Juan Díaz, the chaplain of the Grijalva expedition of 1518, wrote that the Indians

are very ingenious people [muy ingeniosa], and their genius [ingenio] can be perceived in certain golden vessels and in elegant cotton mantles decorated with many figures . . . and they have been usually esteemed as very ingenious [de mucho ingenio] works.38

Similar statements were also written by authors such as the Venetian ambassador Francesco Corner and the artist Albrecht Dürer. The former, after seeing Cortés’s objects at the Spanish court, wrote that they “really testify that in those parts there are ingenious people [persone d’ingegno].”39 The latter, having the opportunity to see objects from Cortés’s shipment when in Brussels in 1520, wrote: “I . . . have wondered at the subtle ingenia of the people in foreign lands.”40 These instances testify how ingenio was a key notion of Renaissance culture and that the Dominican use of the term must be understood as a specific facet of this wider discourse, aimed at supporting the Dominican claims in the debate on the humanity of the inhabitants of the newly discovered American lands. Indeed, Betanzos’s voyage to Italy took place only five years before the emanation of the bull Veritas Ipsa (1537) with which Pope Paul III—strongly encouraged by Dominicans like Bernardino de Minaya—officially declared the humanity of those faraway indigenous peoples. It has been argued that non-Dominican texts such as Dürer’s, that testify to the aesthetic appreciation of the indigenous artefacts, led to the recognition of an “artistic humanity.”41 In a similar but not identical way, the Dominican discourse on natives’ humanity, best represented by Lascasian texts, focused its attention more on the technical excellence of the artefacts than on their aesthetic value. In doing so, and with notable rhetorical skills, they were able to fully exploit the semantic range covered by the term ingenium, so that material properties of the objects (ingenia) were shifted into qualities of the intellect (ingenio) of their producers: When Dávila Padilla wrote about obsidian blades “sharp and penetrating with a strange subtlety,” he was obviously implying that “the artwork praises the artisan,” since sharpness and subtlety—as shown by texts of Las Casas and Dürer—were the most important attributes of ingenium.42 In other words, the physical sharpness of the blades was tangible proof of the intellectual sharpness of the flintknappers.

The fact that artefacts that had been violently confiscated to eradicate indigenous religious customs were used as proof of the natives’ intellectual and religious potential testifies to the paradoxical nature of Christian (and, more generally, Western) universalism, at the same time destroying cultural and religious difference and “saving” its memory. As a consequence, scores of Nahua and Mixtec artefacts, proceeding from the regions of Puebla and Oaxaca where Dominican missionaries were most active, were brought to Italy where they entered local collections. In contrast to the fate of those shipped to Spain, many of these objects have been preserved.

The Social Lives of Mesoamerican Objects in Italian Collections

As soon as the artefacts brought by Dominican missionaries reached the Italian peninsula, they entered local art collections.43 Alberti wrote that he himself

received some books, knives, and the big knife used to kill men to sacrifice them to their idols, which I gave to Mr. Giovanni Achillino to decorate his museum together with a book and a stone knife similar to a razor.44

Other objects must have circulated in Bologna, besides those that entered the museum of antiquities assembled by the erudite humanist, poet, and musician Giovanni Filoteo Achillini (1466–1538). This is testified by several sources who describe them in local collections: a pictorial manuscript with covers of “tiger skin” was seen, probably between 1534 and 1537, by Teseo Ambrogio degli Albonesi in the library of Galeazzo Paleotti.45 “A stone sacrificial knife with a wooden handle,” a “stone razor” and “two painted pages copied from a New World book” were recorded in the 1586 index of the collection of Antonio Giganti (1535–1598).46 A turquoise-covered mask, various small sculptures, a sacrificial knife with wooden ornithomorphic handle, and an obsidian “razor” were part of the museum collection assembled by Ulisse Aldrovandi, who also illustrated them in the Musaeum Metallicum, published posthumously in 1648.47 A pictorial manuscript (now known as Codex Cospi) and a gilded spear-thrower were preserved in the collection of the Zani family: between 1665 and 1667, Valerio Zani offered them to Marquis Ferdinando Cospi for his famed museum, including two mosaic-encrusted knife handles of unknown provenance.48

The whereabouts of the objects brought to Rome during the 16th century are known in a more fragmentary way. Since the link between Codex Vindobonensis and Manuel I of Portugal is doubtful, the Mixtec manuscript could well derive from a Dominican gift, either by Betanzos or – more probably – by a still unknown friar coming from the Mixtec region. Thanks to a mention in Aldrovandi’s Ornithologia, we know that Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, Michelangelo’s intimate friend, owned “elegantly worked” featherwork shields, whose provenance its unfortunately unknown.49 Two Mesoamerican manuscripts (Vat. Lat. 3773 and Vat. Lat. 3738, respectively known as Codices Vaticanus B and A) entered the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana before 1596: the former is a pre-Hispanic manuscript ascribed, as also happens with the Bolognese Codex Cospi, to the so-called “Borgia Group,” so that it can be reasonably traced back to Betanzos’s gift; the latter is a colonial manuscript, written in Italian and partially copied from a manuscript assembled in Puebla around 1560 under the coordination of the Dominican Pedro de los Ríos (Codex Telleriano-Remensis). The Codex Vaticanus A might have been brought to Italy by the missionary (Juan de Córdova?) mentioned in the Descrittione, whose Venice-based author had access to Codex Vaticanus A’s contents through a copy of its text, titled Ragguaglio dell’idolatria del nuovo mondo, still preserved in the Venetian Biblioteca Marciana (Ms. It. Z. 46 = 4748).50

Another manuscript, identified with Codex Borg. Mess. 1 of the Vatican Library, best known as Codex Borgia and the eponymous member of the Borgia Group, appears in the 1600–1611 inventory of the art collection of Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani together with “thirty-six pieces of various items for sacrifices of Indian idols.” The manuscript was then recorded in subsequent inventories of 1621, 1638, and 1649, where the number of “variously shaped wooden idols covered by mosaic” changes to forty, twenty-four, and twenty-one, respectively. The presence of a Borgia Group manuscript in the famous Roman art collection suggests that other Mesoamerican artefacts owned by the Giustiniani may also have proceeded from Betanzos’s gift; indeed, Vincenzo Giustiniani, Benedetto’s uncle, had been General of the Dominican Order between 1558 and 1570, residing in the Convent of Santa Maria della Minerva, the very same one where Betanzos stayed when in Rome.51 Various Mesoamerican artefacts, including the musical instrument mentioned in the Descrittione and a mosaic mask, were displayed in the “Museum of natural, stranger, and ancient curiosities” that Cardinal Flavio Chigi (1631–1693) assembled in Rome.52

The third Italian city where Mesoamerican artefacts surfaced during the 16th century is Florence. Since 1539, featherworks appear in the inventories of the Medici Guardaroba, followed by two Mixtec turquoise masks first recorded in 1553 and 1555, as well as by other artefacts recorded in later inventories.53 Recall that Clement VII was Giulio de Medici; it is thus conceivable that some of these objects proceeded from gifts he had received from Dominican missionaries.

The artefacts from the Aldrovandi and Cospi collections, both housed in the Palazzo Pubblico of Bologna, were moved between 1742 and 1749 to the Accademia dell’Istituto delle Scienze where they were exhibited in the Stanza delle Antichità of the research institute, whose display was influenced by the ideals of the Enlightenment. In 1745, Pope Benedict XIV, the Bolognese Prospero Lambertini, bestowed to the Istituto the musical instrument previously held in the Chigi collection, which he had obtained from Augusto, Flavio Chigi’s brother. On an unknown date toward the end of the century, the Giustiniani family gave the Codex Borgia to Cardinal Stefano Borgia, in whose collection the manuscript was first recorded in 1795.54

During the 19th century, the changing political context initiated by Napoleon’s campaigns in the peninsula, and culminating in the birth of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, resulted in the ownership of many Mesoamerican artefacts that often ended up in public museums. Five objects from the Istituto delle Scienze of Bologna (the Aldrovandi mask, the Chigi musical instrument, as well as two knife handles, and a gilded spear-thrower from the Cospi collection) were transferred to Rome in 1878, and entered the collection of the Museo Nazionale Preistorico ed Etnografico together with one of the turquoise masks from the Medici collection.55 After the death of Cardinal Stefano Borgia in 1804, the Codex Borgia entered the collection of the Congregazione de Propaganda Fide; from there, it passed to the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in 1902.56

Of great interest is the fact that previously unrecorded Mesoamerican artefacts from Italian collections were sold abroad during the 19th century, mostly as a consequence of the economic difficulties then suffered by Italian noble families. Alexander von Humboldt may have obtained a mosaic-covered sculpture of a double-headed jaguar (stylistically very similar to the Bolognese mosaics and thus arguably proceeding from Betanzos’s gift) during his stay in Rome in 1805, where he saw the Codex Borgia in the Borgia collection and where he was also informed about its provenance from the Giustiniani family; the jaguar then passed to the Berlin Ethnological Museum, where it was lost during WWII together with two other Mesoamerican mosaics from the Braunschweig collection. A mosaic-covered bird head representing the Wind God, also stylistically similar to the Bolognese mosaics, entered the collection of the Friedenstein Schloss in Gotha, Germany, around 1824. According to the museum’s inventories, it was brought from Rome by a valet of Friedrich IV of Sachsen-Gotha-Altenburg who had spent long periods in Rome between 1804 and 1820. The fact that in 1811 Friedrich also bought twelve paintings from the Giustiniani family suggests that he also got the mosaic from the same collection.57 At a London auction on April 9, 1856, the then-called Cabinet of American Antiquities of the National Museum of Denmark, in Copenhagen, bought two Mesoamerican mosaic-covered animal heads said to have proceeded from Rome where, according to the inventories, “they probably were brought by a missionary from Mexico.”58 Again, the stylistic similarity of the two objects with the Bolognese mosaics suggests that they ultimately derived from Betanzos’s voyage.

In 1854 the Dominican convent of San Marco, Florence, sold a Mixtec pictorial manuscript to the Englishman John Temple Leader, mediated by Zelia Nuttall who had rediscovered the manuscript in the convent’s collection. The codex was then sent to Robert Curzon, 14th Baron Zouche, who loaned it to the British Museum in 1876.59 The manuscript, today known as Codex Zouche-Nuttall, was acquired by the museum in 1917.

From 1865 to 1894, at least six mosaics from Italian collections were bought by Henry Christy and Augustus Wollanston Franks, and ended up at the British Museum: two masks from Florence, a knife from Venice (or Florence), a shield from Turin, an animal head from an unspecified locality in “Northern Italy,” and a double-headed serpent from Rome.60 The last item on this list was sold in 1894 by Teresa Maria Doria Pamphili Landi, Duchess of Rignano and wife of Duke Emilio Massimo. The Duke could have inherited this mosaic from his ancestor Cardinal Camillo II Massimo (1620–1677), who had been the main art collector of the family. Cardinal Massimo had been raised in the Roman house of his uncle Vincenzo Giustiniani (1564–1637), that is, the person who, together with his brother Benedetto, assembled the abovementioned collection of Mexican mosaics. Two other mosaics in the British Museum collection, a jaguar with a bowl on the back and a helmet, were bought in 1877 and 1893, respectively.61 Their ultimate provenance is unknown, but their stylistic similarity with other mosaics strongly suggests that they also proceeded from Italy, a supposition strengthened by the fact that the helmet was sold by the art dealer William Chaffers who had also mediated the sale of the two Roman mosaics to the Copenhagen museum.

In sum, many of the Mesoamerican “treasures” today preserved in Europe proceed from Italian collections and can be traced back, with varying degrees of certainty, to the Italian voyages of Dominican missionaries who visited the peninsula in the 16th century. Such a provenance, besides suggesting that most of them derived from the Mesoamerican regions under Dominican influence (Puebla, Oaxaca) rather than from the “core” of the Aztec Empire like those shipped by the conquistadors, requires a radical rethinking of the intellectual and cultural milieu in which they were brought, received, and preserved.62

Beyond Curiosity and Exoticism: The Material Legacy of Dominican Activities

Many of the aforementioned artefacts are so famous and iconic that they have played a key role in shaping the European perception of ancient Mesoamerican civilizations since the 16th century. The reading of Italian early modern texts and inventories suggests that categories such as “wonder,” “marvel,” “curiosity,” and “exoticism,” customarily evoked in scholarly treatments of early modern European collecting of non-European things, are insufficient to fully grasp the intellectual attitudes that framed the Italian social life of Mesoamerican things. After being employed as tangible evidence of a Dominican discourse on indigenous Salvation, they entered a world of art collections that—due to the specific character of Italian humanism and its ongoing rediscovery of antiquity—was driven more by an antiquarian sensibility than by feelings of wonder and exoticism. The recurring interaction between texts and objects—where the latter can prove or disprove what is written in the former—is indeed typical of an antiquarian approach that, already evident in the Descrittione, would dominate late 16th- and 17th-century texts such as those written by Ulisse Aldrovandi and Lorenzo Legati (1667).63 Comparisons and analogies with antiquities from the Old World also marked, with different nuances, the 18th-century enlightened gaze on Mesoamerican objects, similar to the later evolutionary one best represented by the 19th-century museums where they ended up.64 It is by exploring this long story of material interactions with Mesoamerican things that we can fully acknowledge their role as objects of mediation imbued with the power to continuously shape our perception of cultural and material difference.

Discussion of the Literature

While Franciscan interactions with Mesoamerican natives have been the subject of a rich literature, the activities of the Dominican order have been less studied and most works focused on the activities of outstanding figures such as Bartolomé de las Casas, Julián Garcés, Francisco de Vitoria, and other members of the School of Salamanca.65

The figure of Domingo de Betanzos has been the focus of a mostly apologetic literature, written by Dominican authors in order to exalt the figure of the founder of the Dominican province in Mexico.66 Interestingly, he was involved in a harsh polemic within the Dominican order initiated by his testimony in front of the Consejo de Indias in which the friar affirmed that Indians were irrational and bestial. Betanzos’s statement ignited harsh responses from both Franciscans and Dominicans friars, such as Julián Garcés and Bernardino de Minaya; Betanzos then retracted his statement on his deathbed.67 The contradiction between these facts and the role that Betanzos played in bringing indigenous artefacts to Italy, perhaps pursuant to the will of his brethren (“The Province gave him some things from the land”68), still remains to be fully explored and clarified.

From the mid-19th century, the presence of Mesoamerican objects in European and Italian collections has been scrutinized: among the most important recent works, where the reader can also find references to earlier literature, are those of Christian Feest, Paula Findlen, Detlef Heikamp, Laura Laurencich Minelli, Lia Markey, and Adriana Turpin.69 If most of the literature on early European collections has adopted categories such as “wonder” and “marvel,” the notion of ingenium has been recently stressed by authors whose works contributed to a more nuanced understanding of what motivated early European collecting of non-European things.70 Alessandra Russo’s work is especially important in this sense.71 The conjoining of these new trends in Mesoamericanist scholarship with the burgeoning literature on early modern antiquarianism promises to open new important research venues.72

Primary Sources

The early shipments sent from Mexico by Spanish conquistadors were recorded in several inventories, letters, and published chronicles; the best general treatment of them, with English translations and detailed references, is still the one provided by Marshall Saville in 1920.73

The main sources on Domingo de Betanzos’s voyage to Italy are Dominican chronicles penned by Leandro Alberti (c. 1548), Agustín Dávila Padilla (1596), Juan Bautista Méndez (1689), and Juan José de la Cruz y Moya (1756–1757).74 To understand the discursive framework of Dominican texts, Las Casas’s own historical writing is of upmost importance.75

The primary sources to investigate the presence of Mesoamerican artefacts in early modern Italy are the collection inventories. Most of them are in manuscript form and are preserved in various Italian archives; however, in some cases they have been published.76 Equally important are older published catalogues and books such as Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Musaeum Metallicum (1648) and Lorenzo Legati’s Museo Cospiano (1667).77

Among the primary sources are also the artefacts themselves, today preserved in libraries and museums such as the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna (Bologna, Italy), the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Rome, Italy), the Museo delle Civiltà (Rome, Italy), the British Museum (London, UK), the National Museum of Denmark (Copenhagen, Denmark), and the Friedenstein Schloss (Gotha, Germany); the old inventories of these museums are also of extreme importance to reconstruct the objects’ biographies.

Further Reading

  • Bleichmar, Daniela, and Peter C. Mancall, eds. Collecting across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.
  • Bujok, Elke. “Ethnographica in Early Modern Kunstkammern and Their Perception.” Journal of the History of Collections 21, no. 1 (2009): 17–32.
  • Domenici, Davide. “Códices mesoamericanos en la Italia de la primera edad moderna: historia y recepción.” In Códices y cultura indígena en México: Homenaje a Alfonso Lacadena García-Gallo. Edited by Juan José Batalla Rosado, José Luis de Rojas, Lizardo Pérez Lugones, 351–375. Madrid: Distinta Tinta Ediciones, 2018.
  • Domenici, Davide. “The Descrittione dell’India occidentale, a Sixteenth-Century Source on the Italian Reception of Mesoamerican Material Culture.” Ethnohistory 64, no. 4 (2017): 497–527.
  • Domenici, Davide. “Mesoamerican Mosaics from Early European Collections: Style, Provenance and Provenience.” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 59 (2020): 8–65.
  • Domenici, Davide. “Missionary Gift Records of Mexican Objects in Early Modern Italy.” In The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492–1750. Edited by Elizabeth Horodowich and Lia Markey, 86–102. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
  • Domenici, Davide. “The Wandering ‘Leg of an Indian King’: The Cultural Biography of a Friction Idiophone Now in the Pigorini Museum in Rome, Italy.” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 102, no. 1 (2016): 79–104.
  • Domenici, Davide, and Laura Laurencich Minelli. “Domingo de Betanzos’ Gifts to Pope Clement VII in 1532–1533: Tracking the Early History of Some Mexican Objects and Codices in Italy.” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 47 (2014): 169–209.
  • Domenici, Davide, and Jesper Nielsen. “The Face of Xolotl: A Unique Mosaic-Covered Object in the National Museum of Denmark.” Mexicon 40, no. 5 (2018): 122–134.
  • Donattini, Massimo. “Il mondo portato a Bologna: viaggiatori, collezionisti, missionari.” In Storia di Bologna. Vol. 3.2: Bologna nell’età moderna (secoli xvi–xviii): Cultura, istituzioni culturali, Chiesa e vita religiosa. Edited by Adriano Prosperi, 537–682. Bologna, Italy: Bononia University Press, 2008.
  • Feest, Christian. “The Collecting of American Indian Artifacts in Europe, 1493–1750.” In America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750. Edited by Karen Ordahl Kupperman, 324–360. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
  • Feest, Christian. “Dürer et les premières évaluatioins européennes de l’art mexicain.” In Destins croisés: cinq siècles de rencontres avec les Amérindiens. Edited by Joëlle Rostkowski and Sylvie Devers, 107–119. Paris: Albin Michel, 1992.
  • Feest, Christian. “European Collecting of American Indian Artifacts and Art.” Journal of the History of Collections 5, no. 1 (1993): 1–11.
  • Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994.
  • Horodowich, Elizabeth, and Lia Markey, eds. The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492–1750. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
  • Impey, Oliver, and Arthur MacGregor, eds. The Origin of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosity in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.
  • Keating, Jessica, and Lia Markey, eds. “Captured Objects: Inventories of Early Modern Collections.” Journal of the History of Collections 23, no. 2 (2011).
  • Markey, Lia. Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
  • Russo, Alessandra. “An Artistic Humanity: New Positions on Art and Freedom in the Context of Iberian Expansion, 1500–1600.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 65–66 (2014–2015): 352–363.
  • Russo, Alessandra. “Cortés’s Objects and the Idea of New Spain: Inventories as Spatial Narratives.” Journal of the History of Collections 23, no. 2 (2011): 229–252.
  • Ulloa, Daniel. Los predicadores divididos: los dominicos en México en el siglo XVI. México: Colegio de México, 1977.

Notes

  • 1. Alessandra Russo, “Cortés’s Objects and the Idea of New Spain: Inventories as Spatial Narratives,” Journal of the History of Collections 23, no. 2 (2011): 229–252; see also Serge Gruzinski, The Eagle and the Dragon: Globalization and European Dreams of Conquest in China and America in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2014).

  • 2. E.g., Francesco Corner, “Exemplum: capitolo di letere di sier Francesco Corner el cavalier, orator, date a Valladolid al dì 6 de marzo 1520,” in Diarii, ed. Marino Sanudo (Venice: Stabilimento Visentini cav. Federico, 1879–1902), XXVIII, 375–376; Giovanni Ruffo da Forlì, Letter of March 7, 1520, in Marcel Bataillon, “Les premiers mexicains envoyés en Espagne par Cortés,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 48 (1959): 135–140; Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, De orbe novo decades I–VIII (Genoa, Italy: Università di Genova, Dipartimento di Archeologia, Filologia Classica e Loro Tradizioni, 2005), Deca V, 553, 559, 694–695, 873; Charles Heaton, The Life of Albrecht Dürer of Nürnberg (London: Seeley, Jackson, and Hallyday, 1881), 297–298; Tommaso Contarini, “Lettera da Valladolid, 10 luglio 1523,” in Fonti italiane per la storia della scoperta del Nuovo Mondo, ed. Guglielmo Berchet (Rome: Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione, 1892–1893), 3 vols., 1:325; and Benedetto Bordone, Libro di Benedetto Bordone (Venice: Nicolò d’Aristotile, 1528), VIII–IX.

  • 3. Ferdinand Anders, The Treasures of Moctezuma: Fantasies and Realities (Vienna: Museum für Völkerkunde, 2001).

  • 4. Walter Lehmann, “Altmexikanische Mosaiken und die Geschenke König Motecuzomas und Cortés,” Globus, 15, no. 20 (1906): 322. English translation is mine.

  • 5. Lauran Toorians, “Some Light in the Dark Century of Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus 1,” Codices Manuscripti 9 (1983): 26–29; Lauran Toorians, “Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus 1: Its History Completed,” Codices Manuscripti 3, no. 10 (1984): 87–97; and Ferdinand Anders, Maarten Jansen, Gabina Aurora, and Pérez Jiménez, Origen e historia de los reyes mixtecos: Libro explicativo del llamado Códice Vindobonensis: Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus 1, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Viena (Graz-Madrid-Mexico: Sociedad Estatal Quinto Centenario-Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstald-Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1992), 21–24.

  • 6. Zelia Nuttall, “Introduction,” in Codex Nuttall: Facsimile of an Ancient Mexican Codex (Cambridge, UK: Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, 1902).

  • 7. Maarten Jansen and Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez, The Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts: Time, Agency, and Memory in Ancient Mexico (Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2011), 57–58; Toorians, “Some Light in the Dark Century”; and Toorians, “Codex Vindobonensis.”

  • 8. Detlef Heikamp, Mexico and the Medici (Florence: Edam, 1972), 9.

  • 9. Eric Thompson, A Commentary on the Dresden Codex: A Maya Hieroglyphic Book (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1972), 14, n. 1.

  • 10. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España (Madrid: Alianza, 1991), 795–796.

  • 11. Massimo Donattini, “Il mondo portato a Bologna: viaggiatori, collezionisti, missionari,” in Storia di Bologna, Vol. 3.2: Bologna nell’età moderna (secoli xvi–xviii): Cultura, istituzioni culturali, Chiesa e vita religiosa, ed. Adriano Prosperi (Bologna, Italy: Bononia University Press, 2008), 537–682. See also Laura Laurencich Minelli, “From the New World to Bologna, 1533: A Gift for Pope Clement VII and Bolognese Collections of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Journal of the History of Collections 24, no. 2 (2012): 145–158.

  • 12. Leandro Alberti, Historie di Bologna, 1479–1543 (Bologna, Italy: Costa Editore, [1548] 2006), 629–630.

  • 13. Davide Domenici and Laura Laurencich Minelli, “Domingo de Betanzos’ Gifts to Pope Clement VII in 1532–1533: Tracking the Early History of Some Mexican Objects and Codices in Italy,” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 47 (2014): 169–209.

  • 14. Agustín Dávila Padilla, Historia de la fundación y discurso de la Provincia de Santiago de México (Madrid: Pedro Madrigal, 1596), 73–74.

  • 15. Davide Domenici, “The Descrittione dell’India occidentale, a Sixteenth-Century Source on the Italian Reception of Mesoamerican Material Culture,” Ethnohistory 64, no. 4 (2017): 497–527.

  • 16. Davide Domenici, “Missionary Gift Records of Mexican Objects in Early Modern Italy,” in The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492–1750, ed. Elizabeth Horodowich and Lia Markey (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 86–102.

  • 17. Dávila Padilla, Historia de la fundación, 73. English translation is mine.

  • 18. Alberti, Historie di Bologna, 630. English translation is mine.

  • 19. Anonymous, Descrittione, in Domenici, “The Descrittione,” 509–510, 514–515. English translation is mine.

  • 20. Alberti, Historie di Bologna, 630. English translation is mine.

  • 21. Anonymous, Descrittione, 512, 518. English translation is mine.

  • 22. Anonymous, Descrittione, 511, 516–517. English translation is mine.

  • 23. Anonymous, Descrittione, 512, 517–518. English translation is mine.

  • 24. Anonymous, Descrittione, 508, 513–514. English translation is mine.

  • 25. Alberti, Historie di Bologna, 629–630. English translation is mine.

  • 26. Dávila Padilla, Historia de la fundación, 73–74. English translation is mine.

  • 27. Alberti, Historie di Bologna, 630; and Anonymous, Descrittione, 510, 515. English translations are mine.

  • 28. Dávila Padilla, Historia de la fundación, 73–74. English translation is mine.

  • 29. Alberti, Historie di Bologna, 630; and Anonymous, Descrittione, 508, 514. English translations are mine.

  • 30. Alberti, Historie di Bologna, 630; see also Alessandra Russo, “Image-plume, temps reliquaire? Tangibilité d’une histoire esthétique (Nouvelle-Espagne, XVIe–XVIIe siecles),” Images Re-vues [En ligne], Hors-série 1 (2008): 1–17.

  • 31. Anonymous, Descrittione, 508, 510, 514–515. English translation is mine.

  • 32. Bartolomé de las Casas, “Apologética Historia Sumaria,” in Obras Completas, vol. 7 (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1992), 590–591. English translation is mine.

  • 33. Las Casas, “Apologética,” 592. English translation is mine.

  • 34. Las Casas, “Apologética,” 602. English translation is mine.

  • 35. Las Casas, “Apologética,” 88. English translation is mine.

  • 36. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Democrate secondo, ovvero sulle giuste cause di guerra/Democrates secundus sive de iustis belli causis (Macerata, Italy: Quodlibet, 2009), 56; anonymous english translation, Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), 523.

  • 37. Anonymous, Descrittione, 508, 514. English translation is mine.

  • 38. Juan Díaz, “Itinerario de la armada del Rey Católico,” in Itinerario di Ludovico de Varthema bolognese ne lo Egypto ne la Suria ne la Arabia deserta & felice ne la Persia: ne la India & ne la Ethiopia: La fede el uiuere & constumi de le prefate prouincie: Et al presente agiontoui alcune isole nouamente ritrouate (Venice: Zorzi di Rusconi, 1520), 101. English translation is mine.

  • 39. Francesco Corner, “Exemplum,” XXVIII, 375–376. English translation is mine.

  • 40. Dürer’s words are cited in Charles Heaton, The Life of Albrecht Dürer, 297–298. See also, “Carta del licenciado Alonso Zuazo,” in Joaquin García Icazbalceta, Coleccion de documentos para la historia de México, 2 vols. (Mexico: Andrade, 1858), 1:560.

  • 41. Alessandra Russo, “An Artistic Humanity: New Positions on Art and Freedom in the Context of Iberian Expansion, 1500–1600,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 65–66 (2014–2015): 352–363.

  • 42. Dávila Padilla, Historia de la fundación, 74; and Las Casas, “Apologética,” 602. See also Rhodri Lewis, “Francis Bacon and Ingenuity,” Renaissance Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2014): 113–117. As examples of the relevance of the notion of “subtlety” in early modern European thinking, see Girolamo Cardano, De subtilitate rerum (Nürnberg, Germany: Johann Petreius, 1550); and Baltasar Gracián, Agudeza y arte de ingenio (Huesca, Spain: Ivan Nogues, 1648).

  • 43. For a detailed analysis of the spread of the artifacts in Italian collections and how it is related to stylistic groups which can be ascertained within the extant corpus of mosaics and codices, see Davide Domenici, “Mesoamerican Mosaics from Early European Collections: Style, Provenance and Provenience,” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 59 (2020): 8–65.

  • 44. Alberti, Historie di Bologna, 630. English translation is mine.

  • 45. Teseo Ambrogio degli Albonesi, Introductio in Chaldaicam linguam, Syriacam, atque Armenicam, & dece alias linguas (Pavia, Italy: G. M. Simoneta, 1539), 198r–v; Donattini, “Il mondo portato a Bologna,” 577–578; and Domenici and Laurencich Minelli, “Domingo de Betanzos’ Gifts,” 188–190.

  • 46. Antonio Giganti, “Indice” [1586], in Laura Laurencich Minelli, “L’indice del museo di Antonio Giganti: Interessi etnografici e ordinamento di un museo cinquecentesco,” Museologia Scientifica 1, no. 3–4 (1984). English translation is mine.

  • 47. Ulisse Aldrovandi, Musaeum Metallicum (Bologna, Italy: Ferroni, 1648), 156–158, 539–544, 550–551; and Davide Domenici, “Rediscovery of a Mesoamerican greenstone sculpture from the collection of Ulisse Aldrovandi,” Journal of the History of collections, online preview (2021): 1–21.

  • 48. Laura Laurencich Minelli, “Museography and Ethnographical Collections in Bologna during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in The Origin of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosity in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe, ed. Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 17–23.

  • 49. Detlef Heikamp, “American Objects in Italian Collections of the Renaissance and Baroque: A Survey,” in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. Fredi Chiappelli (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), 461–462.

  • 50. Davide Domenici, “Nuovi dati per una storia dei codici messicani della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,” Miscellanea Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae XXII, ed. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Città del Vaticano, Italy: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2016), 341–362; and Davide Domenici, “Códices mesoamericanos en la Italia de la primera edad moderna: historia y recepción,” in Códices y cultura indígena en México: Homenaje a Alfonso Lacadena García-Gallo, ed. Juan José Batalla Rosado, José Luis de Rojas, and Lizardo Pérez Lugones (Madrid: Distinta Tinta Ediciones, 2018), 351–375.

  • 51. Domenici and Laurencich Minelli, “Domingo de Betanzos’ Gifts,” 193–196. English translations are mine.

  • 52. Davide Domenici, “The Wandering ‘Leg of an Indian King’: The Cultural Biography of a Friction Idiophone Now in the Pigorini Museum in Rome, Italy,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 102, no. 1 (2016): 79–104.

  • 53. Heikamp, Mexico and the Medici, 34–38.

  • 54. Domenici, “The Wandering ‘Leg of an Indian King’”; and Domenici, “Códices mesoamericanos.”

  • 55. Luigi Pigorini, Gli antichi oggetti messicani incrostati di mosaico esistenti nel Museo Preistorico ed Etnografico di Roma (Roma: Reale Accademia dei Lincei, 1885).

  • 56. Domenici, “Nuovi dati per una storia dei codici messicani.”

  • 57. Davide Domenici and Élodie Dupey García, “The Wind God and the Descent of the Tzitzimitl: New Insights on the Iconography and Provenance of the Mosaic-Encrusted Bird Head at the Friedenstein Palace, Gotha (Germany),” Ancient Mesoamerica, online preview (2021): 1–26.

  • 58. Davide Domenici and Jesper Nielsen, “The Face of Xolotl: A Unique Mosaic-Covered Object in the National Museum of Denmark,” Mexicon 40, no. 5 (2018): 122–134.

  • 59. Nuttall, “Introduction.”

  • 60. Elizabeth Carmichael, Turquoise Mosaics from Mexico (London: The British Museum, 1970); and Marjorie Caygill, “Henry Christy, A. W. Franks and the British Museum’s Turquoise Mosaics,” in Turquoise in Mexico and North America, ed. Jonathan C. H. King, Caroline Cartwright, and Colin McEwan (London: The British Museum, 2012), 183–196.

  • 61. Caygill, “Henry Christy,” 194–195.

  • 62. Davide Domenici, “Mesoamerican Mosaics from Early European Collections.”.

  • 63. Davide Domenici, “Rediscovery of a Mesoamerican greenstone sculpture”; and Davide Domenici, “Tasting Clay, Testing Clay: Medicinal Earths, Bucarophagy and Experiential Knowledge in Lorenzo Legati’s Museo Cospiano, 1677,” Chromos 22 (2019): 1–6.

  • 64. Davide Domenici, “The Wandering.”

  • 65. Some general overviews are Alberto Maria Carreño, Misioneros en México (Mexico: Jus, 1962); Pedro Fernández Rodríguez, Los dominicos en el contexto de la primera evangelización de México, 1526–1550 (Salamanca, Spain: Editorial San Esteban, 1994); Robert Ricard, La “conquête spirituelle” du Mexique: Essai sur l’apostolat et les méthodes missionnaires des Ordres mendiants en Nouvelle-Espagne de 1523–1524 à 1572 (Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie, 1933); and Daniel Ulloa, Los predicadores divididos: los dominicos en México en el siglo xvi (México: Colegio de México, 1977). See also the proceedings of the various Congreso Internacional sobre los Dominicos y el Nuevo Mundo. See also Lewis Hanke, All Mankind Is One: A Study of the Disputation between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indian (Chicago: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974); Anthony Pagden, The Fall of the Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and David Thomas Orique and Rady Roldán-Figueroa, eds., Bartolomé de las Casas, O.P. History, Philosophy, and Theology in the Age of European Expansion (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2018).

  • 66. Adolphe Bandelier, “Fray Domingo Betanzos,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Charles Herbermann et al. (New York: The Encyclopedia Press, 1913); Alberto María Carreño, Fray Domingo de Betanzos, fundador en la Nueva España de la venerable orden dominicana (México: Biblioteca Enciclopédica del Estado de México, 1824); Felix Jay, Three Dominican Pioneers in the New World: Antonio de Montesinos, Domingo de Betanzos, Gonzalo Lucero (Lewinston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2002); Juan Rodríguez Cabal, El P. Fr. Domingo de Betanzos, O.P., fundador en Guatemala de los Dominicos (Guatemala: Sánchez & De Guise, 1934); José Omar Tinajero Morales, Fray Domingo de Betanzos: Semblanza de un misionero incansable (México: CEASDP, 2009); and Alfonso Trueba, Dos libertadores: Fray Julián Garcés y Fray Domingo de Betanzos (México: Editorial Campeador, 1955).

  • 67. Alberto María Carreño, “La irracionalidad de los indios,” Divulgación Histórica 1, no. 8 (1940): 338–349; Lino Gómez Cañedo, “Hombres o bestias? Nuevo examen crítico de un viejo tópico,” Estudios de Historia Novohispana 1 (1966): 29–51; Lewis Hanke, “Pope Paul III and the American Indians,” Harvard Theological Review 30, no. 2 (1937): 65–102; Alberto de la Hera, “El derecho de los indios a la libertad y a la fe: la bula “Sublimis Deus” y los problemas indianos que la motivaron,” Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español 26 (1956): 89–181; Edmundo O’Gorman, “Sobre la naturaleza bestial del indio americano,” Filosofía y Letras 2 (1941): 141–159; Adolfo Robles Sierra, “Una aproximación a Domingo de Betanzos: A propósito de su carta de 1540,” in Actas del III Congreso Internacional “Los Dominicos y el Nuevo Mundo” (Salamanca, Spain: Editorial San Esteban, 1990), 227–258; Patricia Seed, “‘Are These Not Also Men?’ The Indians’ Humanity and Capacity for Spanish Civilisation,” Journal of Latin American Studies 25, no. 3 (1993): 629–652; and Carlos Sempat Assadourian, “Hacia la ‘Sublimis Deus’: las discordias entre los dominicos indianos y el enfrentamiento del franciscano padre Tastera con el padre Betanzos,” Historia Mexicana 47, no. 3 (1998): 465–536.

  • 68. Dávila Padilla, Historia de la fundación, 73. English translation is mine. See also Davide Domenici, 2014. “Cose dell’altro mondo: nuovi dati sul collezionismo italiano di oggetti messicani tra XVI e XVII secolo,” in L’Impero e le Hispaniae. Da Traiano a Carlo V. Classicismo e potere nell’arte spagnola, ed. Sandro de Maria and Manuel Parada López de Corselas (Bologna, Italy: Bononia University Press), 471–483.

  • 69. Christian Feest, “Mexico and South America in the European Wunderkammer,” in The Origin of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosity in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe, ed. Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 237–244; Christian Feest, “The Collecting of American Indian Artifacts in Europe, 1493–1750,” in America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994); Heikamp, Mexico and the Medici; Heikamp, “American Objects in Italian Collections of the Renaissance and Baroque,” 455–482; Laurencich Minelli, “Museography and Ethnographical Collections,” 17–23; Lia Markey, Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); and Adriana Turpin, “The New World Collections of Duke Cosimo I de’Medici and their Role in the Creation of a Kunst- und Wunderkammer in the Palazzo Vecchio,” in Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. Robert John Weston Evans and Alexander Marr (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 63–85.

  • 70. E.g., Anthony Alan Shelton, “Cabinets of Transgression: Renaissance Collections and the Incorporation of the New World,” in Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 177–203; and Isabel Yaya, “Wonders of America: The Curiosity Cabinet as a Site of Representation and Knowledge,” Journal of the History of Collections 20, no. 2 (2008): 173–188.

  • 71. Christian Feest, “Dürer et les premières évaluatioins européennes de l’art mexicain,” in Destins croisés: cinq siècles de rencontres avec les Amérindiens, ed. Joëlle Rostkowski and Sylvie Devers (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992), 107–119; Patricia Falguières, “Les inventeurs des choses: Enquêtes sur les arts et naissance d’une science de l’homme dans les cabinets du XVIe siècle,” Histoire de l’Art et Anthropologie (Paris: INHA-Musée du quai Branly, 2009); Russo, “An Artistic Humanity”; and Domenici, “Missionary Gift Records.” On the notion of ingenium in early modern European culture, see Jürgen Klein, “Genius, Ingenium, Imagination: Aesthetic Theories of Production from the Renaissance to Romanticism,” in The Romantic Imagination, ed. Frederick Burwick (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 19–162; Stefano Gensini and Arturo Martone, eds., Ingenium propria hominis natura (Naples, Italy: Liguori Editore, 2002); and Lewis, “Francis Bacon.”

  • 72. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 (1950): 285–315; Peter N. Miller, Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Alain Schnapp, ed., World Antiquarianism: Comparative Perspectives (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013); and Benjamin Anderson and Felipe Rojas, eds., Antiquarianisms: Contact, Conflict, Comparison (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2017). On antiquarianism and the indigenous American world, see Alain Schnapp, “Ancient Europe and Native Americans: A Comparative Reflection on the Roots of Antiquarianism,” in Collecting across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, ed. Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C. Mancall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Alain Schnapp, “European Antiquarianism and the Discovery of the New World,” in Past Presented: Archaeological Illustration and the Ancient Americas, ed. Joanne Pillsbury (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections, 2012), 49–67; Giuseppe Marcocci, “Inventing the Antiquities of New Spain: Motolinía and the Mexican Antiquarian Traditions,” in Anderson and Rojas, Antiquarianisms, 109–133; and Domenici, “Tasting Clay, Testing Clay.”

  • 73. Marshall Saville, The Goldsmith’s Art in Ancient Mexico (New York: Museum of the American Indian Heye Foundation, 1920), 8–104.

  • 74. Alberti, Historie di Bologna; Dávila Padilla, Historia de la fundación; Juan José de la Cruz y Moya, Historia de la santa y apostólica Provincia de Santiago de Predicadores de México en la Nueva España (México: Manuel Porrúa, 1954); and Juan Bautista Méndez, Crónica de la Provincia de Santiago de México de la Orden de Predicadores (1521–1564) (México, Editorial Porrúa, 1993).

  • 75. Las Casas, “Apologética.”

  • 76. Giovanni Incisa della Rocchetta, “Il Museo delle Curiosità del Cardinale Flavio Chigi Seniore,” Roma 3, no. 12 (1925): 539–544; Laurencich Minelli, “L’indice del museo di Antonio Giganti”; Silvia Danesi Squarzina, La collezione Giustiniani (Torino, Italy: Einaudi, 2003); and Beatrice Cacciotti, La collezione di antichità del cardinale Flavio Chigi (Roma: Aracne, 2004).

  • 77. Aldrovandi, Musaeum Metallicum; Lorenzo Legati, Breve descrizione del museo dell’Illustriss. Sig. Cav. Commend. dell’Ordine di S. Stefano Ferdinando Cospi . . . donato dal medesimo all’Illustriss. Senato, & ora annesso al famoso cimeliarchio del celebre Aldrovandi (Bologna, Italy: Giovan Battista Ferroni, 1667); Lorenzo Legati, Museo Cospiano annesso a quello del famoso Ulisse Aldrovandi e donato alla sua patria dall’illustrissimo signor Ferdinando Cospi (Bologna, Italy: Giacomo Monti, 1677); and Lorenzo Legati, Inventario semplice di tutte le materie esattamente descritte che si trovano nel Museo Cospiano non solo le notate nel libro già stampato, e composto dal sig. dottore Lorenzo Legati mà ancora le aggiuntevi in copia dopo la fabrica (Bologna, Italy: Giacomo Monti, 1680).