2012 Chapters (Layout Features)

“Uncatchable Colors.”

Russo, Alessandra

Throughout the pages of the present volume, the colorants used to paint the Florentine Codex, along with those minutely described in its book 11, have been put in dialogue with the materie prime-the minerals, plants, seeds, and insects that went into their making, as well as the artificial compounds already in use in Mesoamerica or imported from Europe. Thanks to the scientific observation of the pigments under the microscope and to the interpretations of the scholars involved in this groundbreaking research, we now know rather more about the making of one of the most prominent artworks of Early Modernity, a collective artwork, undertaken by a team of what scholars have indentified as twenty-two painters and eight scribes working with the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún in the College of Santa Cruz of Tlatelolco. Up to now, the study of the images contained in this masterpiece has been mostly iconographic, with the pictures treated as illustrations of the text, or as images relating lo pre-Hispanic pictography or to engravings available to the tlacuiloque. However, deeper creative layers now appear to us on the more than twelve hundred folios of the codex. Each color applied to paper encapsulates a world, and as Diana Magaloni Kerpel has convincingly proposed, each instance of a color or tonality-in all of the 2686 images-is a bearer of meaning.