Adaptation and Accommodation The Transformation of the Pictorial Text in Sahagun's Manuscripts ELLEN T.BAIRD It is very difficult to get a notion of what it was to be a person of a certain kind at a certain time and place. It is here that pictorial style is helpfal. A society develops its distinctive skills and habits, which have a visual aspect, since the visual sense is the main organ of experience, and these visual skills and habits become part of the medium of the painter: correspondi ngly, a pictorial style gives access to the visual skills and habits, and, through these, to the distinctive social experience. An old picture is the record of visual activity. One has to learn to read it, just as one has to learn to read a text from a different culture, evenwhen one knows, in a limited sense, the language: bothlanguage and pictorial representation are conventional activities ( Michael Baxandall ).' Introduction THE WORKS OF the Spanish Franciscan friar, Bernardino de Sahagun, are b est known today as records of pre-Conquest central Mexican religion, culture, and language. Ye t, they are post-Conquest documents and are equally useful as records of the dramatic changes occurring in Mexico (New Spain ) in the sixteenth century. Some of these are readily apparent to scholar and non-scholar alike in the illustrations of Sahagun's two profusely illustrated manuscripts: the Primeros Memoriales , completed in 1561, and the Florentine Codex, completed between 1578 and 1580.' The illustrations provide us with primary evidence of the change in pictorial style, those distinctive visual skills and habits that give us access to the social experience of sixteenth-century Mexico.Because the 'texts' in pre-Conquest manuscripts were exclusively pictorial, Sahagun's illustrations take on added importance. Illustrations and written texts derive from information Sahagun and his assistants gathered orally from native informants and pictorially from the indigenous manuscripts the informants showed Sahagun.' In 1557 Sahagun was ordered by his Franciscan provincial to compile information on the Indian religion and culture for use in converting them to Christianity. 36 AD APTAT I O N AN D ACC OM M OD AT I O N In his work , Sahagun was assisted by four young native men who were fluent in Spanish, Latin, and Nahuatl (the Aztec language) and who had been his students at the Indian school of Santa Cruz, Tlatelolco, where they were given a humanistic education. Sahagun approached his task systematically and objectively: he interviewed elderly informants, studied pre-Conquest pictorial manuscripts, studied the Nahuatl language , spoke of laying the groundwork for a dictionary, and presented the information he gathered in an orderly fashion.' In previous work, I have presented an overview of the extent to which European style, format, and function are present in the drawings of Sahagun's two illustrated manuscripts.' In the present brief study, I am initiating an examination of the significance of those Europeanizations with regard to the manuscripts' artists, their perception of the world in which they lived, and the audience for which each manuscript was created. Pre-Conquest Mexicanand Sixteenth-century European Pictorial Styles It is fairly easy to recognize the basic differences between pre-Conquest Mexican and sixteenth-century European pictorial styles. Pre-Conquest style has been described most simply as ' conceptual' (figure r). The two-dimensionality of the image and the surface on which it is painted are asserted . Human figures are composed of separable units and are often posed unnaturalistically in order to present the significantly informative elements of the figures or their accoutrements as clearly and unambiguously as possible. Architectural and geographical forms are conventionally represented as signs. Two-dimensional space is often used to convey the passage of time, as in a sequence of actions, the intervals between generations, or elapsed travel time between geographical locations.' In contrast, sixteenth-century European painting is characterized as 'percep tual' (figure 2). Human figures and architectural and geographic forms are represented in a naturalistic and convincingly illusionistic manner . Artists use devices such as contour line, modeling, and hatching to create the illusion of three dimensions. The two-dimensionality of the surface is denied through techniques that create the illusion of depth of space: overlapped im ages, diminution in size, relative placement of the figure on the pictorial plane (figures that are smaller and higher are read as more distant than those that are larger and lower on the picture plane ), and aerial (or atmosphe ric) and linear perspective. Indeed, artistic creation of illusionistic space is one of the hallmarks of Renaissance art . Developed by the fifteenth-century Florentine architect Filippo Brun elleschi, linear perspective was a 'new geometric construction which could give a sense of unity and consistency to any illusionary picture.'' Scenes are focused and unified both in space and time. 37 NAT I VE A RT I ST S AND PAT RO NS I N CO LO N IAL LAT I N AM E R IC A Figure 1. Codex Borbonicus, folio 12. From George C.Valliant , A Sacred Almanacof theAztecs (Tona lamatl of the Codex Borbonicus) (New York, 1940 ), plate 33. The role of pictures in books was also different in Europe and pre-Conquest Mexico . The pictures are the text in pre-Conquest ' books.' The most common formats are the screen-fold and the tira, both of long, relatively narrow strips of paper or animal skin. The pictorial text is read as a continuous narrative spread out across many pages that unfold or unroll, respectively. In sixtee nth-ce ntury European books, an alphabetic text conveys inform ation and the illustrations may serve a secondary, even purely decorative, role. Predominant is the codex form, in which leaves of paper are sewn together and the pages are read front and back in singular, sequential order. ADAPTATIO AND ACCOM M OD AT IO N Figure 2. Albrecht Durer , Saint Jerome in His Study, 1514, engraving. Clarence Buckingham Collectio n, 1990 , The Art Institute of Chicago, All Rights Reserved. 39 N ATI V E A RT I S T S A N D PAT RO NS I N CO LO N I AL LAT I N AM E R I C A After the Conquest of Mexico, European influence soon began to be evident in Mexican manuscripts. By copying, Indian artists learned the forms of European art; through both observation and formal education they assimilated European style, iconography, and an increasingly perceptual form of representa tion. However, the post-Conquest Indian artists cannot be characterized as merely imitative, for they often changed things; imitation was often tempered by innovation. ' Primeros Memoriales The Primeros Memoriales, the first of Sahagun's extensively illustrated manuscripts, is a codex with a Nahuatl text. The pages are most commonly laid out in two columns with the text on the left and the pictures on the right (figu re 3); however , there are numerous exceptions to this pattern. Although the format of the book is European, the drawings are predominantly native in subject matter, motifs, and style. Very few indications of European style are present and European influence is primarily limited to conventionalized representations: a European crescent moon is juxtaposed with a pre-Conquest type sun; conventionalized European clouds are used; and the melancholy chin-in -hand pose (with its origins in classical antiquity ) is also employed for several figu res. Although these do not look pre-Conquest , they too are all conventions: regularized, simplified ways of representing things that in nature are complex forms. In addition, the drawings often convey information that is not in the text and therefore retain their pre-Conquest function as pictorial texts. Elsewhere I have hypothesized that the artists of the Primeros Memoriales were Saha gun's Europeanized native assistants ,' who were well-schooled in the humanistic tradition . The sixteenth-century library of the school at Tlatelolco contained the works of such classical authors as Pliny, Quintilian, Plutarch, and Cicero. Vocabularies , grammatical and rhetorical treatises, and works on natural philosophy and history are also listed in the inventory of 1572.10 Irving Leonard points out that 'cont rary to beliefs still prevail ing, sixteenth -centur y Spanish America was able to acquire the finest products of European as well as Spanish book manufactur ers .' 11 Exposure to and understanding of European pictorial motifs from books and prints is clearly indicated by the European conventions that are used in the Primeros Memoriales. The adherence to pre-Conquest style and format in the Primeros Memoriales is then, I think, related to the function of the manuscript, as will be seen. The information for the Primeros Memoriales came from Sahagun's interviews with elderly native informants. They answered his questions ' by means of pictures, which was [sic] the writing they had used of old, and the assistants explained them in their language, writing the explanation at the foot of the picture.' Sahagun went on to say, 'Even now I have these originals.' 12 The textual function and indigenous 40 AD APT AT I O N A ACCOM M OD AT I O D .. :, ., "" lfu h t t\ th h o ' 1"1, m1 tM 111-,.,,. ••• lft(lti\4, • '1 ''" lt, r,, A P.' ..tl1II v1t\ I'!'.. \ r11l1•i." ' 0 1"'4 \\, •ftttd C_11I, }'° ' t.01 At.. n .1n \J! fl r' 1•••1111,, \.-,, 1 .,.._" , il 11''" "°"'"- '