In 2020, you began working as a research specialist at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Tell us about the project that you are part of there.
My current position at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) focuses on the creation of an open-access digital edition of the encyclopedic Florentine Codex (1575-77), a manuscript written in collaboration between a Franciscan friar and a team of Indigenous scholars. My job is to identify the content and iconography of its painted third narrative of ∼2,500 images to make them searchable in four languages: 16th century Nahuatl, English, Spanish and modern Nahuatl de la Huasteca. This multilingual art historical and ethnographic terminology will have even further reach and longevity through its inclusion in Getty’s databases of controlled vocabularies used as metadata by museums and archives across the globe. Most importantly, the project will make the manuscript freely available with transcriptions of the original 16th-century Nahuatl and Spanish texts, as well as translations into English and summaries in modern Nahuatl spoken by millions of Indigenous Nahua people in Mexico, the United States and around the globe. Opening the archives with projects like this is a critical means of empowerment for Indigenous communities.
Articles about the Florentine Codex and its significance, particularly as a project produced during a pandemic and as an alternate Indigenous account of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, have recently appeared in the Los Angeles Times and on the Getty’s blog. The GRI Florentine Codex Initiative can now be found online.
How does your work at the Getty intersect with your own dissertation research?
The Florentine Codex is one of the most valuable primary documents for scholars of early modern Mesoamerica, with its 12 books describing life in the environment of central Mexico in the 16th century. Nearly any subject you can imagine is contained within its illuminated pages, from the complexities of verbal etiquette in the Mexica court to detailed botanical descriptions of herbs used in Indigenous medicine. It is a treasure trove, and it is in some cases the only source of information about particular species or cultural practices as they existed in the 16th century. My dissertation, The Invisible in Early Modern Nahua Art, investigates the significance of invisible emanations in artworks of central Mexico. For instance, the semantics of Nahuatl language and Nahua philosophical frameworks of knowledge generation and transmission are exemplified in the concept of tlacuilolli— represented by a pair of speech scrolls in conversation with each other. Typically, scholars translate this term as “writing,” but the word refers more globally to a “marked surface” that includes writing along with painting, sculpture and more. Tlacuilolli offers a category to art historians (of any region) with the potential to correct a limiting assumption of separation between image and text. Analyzing primary sources like the Florentine Codex helps me understand how concepts like tlacuilolli shaped the creation of images in central Mexico in the 14th and 15th centuries.
What are your travel/research plans this year as things open back up?
Two important trips are on the horizon for me. This spring, I am looking forward to working with the Florentine Codex in person at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, Italy. Along with three of my colleagues from the Florentine Codex Initiative at the GRI, we are collaborating to characterize the many hands that worked together to produce the manuscript to better understand the organization of the workshop. For instance, we already know that at least 22 people contributed to the images while seven transcribed the alphabetic texts. We can do a lot of the work from high resolution images, but working with the manuscript in person is invaluable.
In Mexico, I am eager to visit the community that a colleague and I believe may be the origin of a document now in the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian we published a new analysis of earlier this year. With imaging provided by our colleagues at the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, I was able to transcribe most of the short alphabetic text in Nahuatl for the first time since the manuscript came to the attention of scholars a century ago. This transcription identified not only one of its previous owners, but also the names of subordinate communities or neighborhoods of the larger polity described in the manuscript’s main pictographic text. While those names may no longer be in use at the level of published maps and official documents, we hope on-the-ground conversations with members of the community will reveal enough legacy information to locate its origin precisely. Our goal is to bring the document to the attention of these communities for whom it is part of their local history.
Alanna Radlo-Dzur is a PhD student in History of Art at Ohio State, currently on leave for her position at the Getty Research Institute.
