Antiquarianisms by Anderson Benjamin; Rojas Felipe; & Felipe Rojas

Author:Anderson, Benjamin; Rojas, Felipe; & Felipe Rojas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Published: 2017-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

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Inventing the Antiquities of New Spain: Motolinía and the Mexican Antiquarian Traditions

GIUSEPPE MARCOCCI

Antiquarian Convergences across the Atlantic

Arnaldo Momigliano (1950) associates the origins of antiquarianism with the Renaissance. What emerged in Europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, was just an early modern variant of a more widespread attitude towards the past, which had precedents in many cultures and societies across time and around the globe (Miller 2012; Schnapp et al. 2014). It was the antiquarian practices of Central Mexico under the Aztec Empire (1428–1521) that the still fledgling European antiquarian approaches initially encountered when they crossed the Atlantic in the early sixteenth century. The first Spaniards who wrote about pre-Hispanic Mexico showed increasing sensitivity to its remains and developed a clear interest in architectonic ruins, stone images, votive objects, and other relics. But how did they deploy their European antiquarian attitudes to the analysis of the material reality of Central Mexico? What was the effect of their interactions with native interpreters of local antiquities?

This article aims to explore mutual exchanges and reactions that contributed to the birth of colonial antiquarianism in the Americas. Although this hypothesis entails the idea of cultural commensurability, post-conquest Mexico did not see any harmonious mélange of antiquarianisms. This was in part because European and American antiquarian traditions were built on different notions of time and the past, but also because, during contact, the persistent attachment of Aztecs to their votive objects and relics at times went alongside forms of resistance to the Spaniards, while the latter’s curiosity in pre-Hispanic remains formed part of a project to establish a new political and religious order.

My main focus is on the writings of the Franciscan friar Toribio de Motolinía, the author of the earliest surviving treatise on what he called the “antiquities of the Indians of New Spain.” The first part of the chapter provides a preliminary discussion of the place things from the past occupied in both pre-Hispanic Mexico and Renaissance Europe on the eve of the conquest, as well as of the importance of material culture in colonial encounters more generally. I discuss the understanding of historical time by the Franciscans, who were the first to arrive as missionaries in Mexico and to classify its pre-Hispanic monuments and relics as “antiquities.” The rest of the chapter considers the writings of one of these friars, Motolinía, as a key to penetrating not only the early elaboration of a Spanish representation of Mexico’s complex past, but also the persistence and transformation of still surviving indigenous antiquarian practices. The advantage of concentrating on Motolinía derives from the fact that he started putting together his writings by the late 1520s, when the conquest was still ongoing, the indigenous memory of the pre-Hispanic period alive, and the colonial construction of the “history of New Spain” was in its early stages. To anticipate my argument, Motolinía’s “invention” of the antiquities of New Spain follows two general lines. He carefully observes and comments on material evidence that he connects to

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