The Codex Ixtlilxochitl is a pictorial document whose nature and features reflect the milieu of New Spain in the early colonial period--it is more European than Aztec in conception, style, and technology, but it is topically focused in the Aztec past. The manuscript itself is a composite of three distinct and unrelated documents from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that were gathered and bound together before the middle of the eighteenth century and have remained together until recently when the pages were disbound.¹

The first section (fols. 94-104), dating about 1600, is a partial copy of an early cultural encyclopedia that was created between 1529 and 1553 at the behest of a mendicant friar to picture and catalogue Aztec ritual life. The lost original, known today as the prototype of the Magliabechiano Group, contained over sixty paintings of feasts, deities, calendrical cycles, and customs executed by an Aztec-trained artist; almost all were annotated with explanatory glosses and texts in Spanish and Nahuatl. The Codex Ixtlilxochitl preserves the paintings and written descriptions of the cycle of eighteen monthly feasts (fol. 97r), two versions of the deity Quetzalcoatl, and two mortuary rituals.²

The third section (fols. 113-22) is an unillustrated discussion of the Aztec calendar, very similar to the Spanish text of the first nineteen chapters in

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book 2 of Bernardino de Sahagún's Historia general.³ Thus like the first section, it is founded in the intellectual world of the mendicants.

The second section (fols. 105-12) is more closely connected to the Spanish imperial administration, although it also treats Aztec customs and religion. It is an illustrated fragment of La relación de Texcoco, written by Juan Bautista Pomar in answer to the relación geográfica questionnaire of 1577. Designed to elicit fundamental information about communities in Spain's overseas empire on the order of Philip II, this questionnaire asked fifty broad questions to be answered by local town officials in the polities in New Spain. In 1582 Pomar, a mestizo descendant of the Aztec rulers of Texcoco, responded for his city with an extensive document that included a major discussion of Aztec deities as well as comments on many other aspects of Precolumbian and early colonial Aztec culture. The Ixtlilxochitl fragment contains six of the illustrations meant to accompany the relación. There are four full-length portraits of the Precolumbian rulers of Texcoco, which consciously present the elegance and refinement of Aztec nobility through sumptuous costuming (fol. 107r). More important, however, are the painting of the water god Tlaloc and the representation of the Templo Mayor in Texcoco. The Tlaloc painting is the

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most elaborate deity representation to have survived from the early colonial period, and the Templo Mayor painting is the finest early rendering of Aztec religious architecture; both have fragments of Pomar's text on their other sides.

The standing Tlaloc is an extraordinary figure, a blend of Precolumbian and European manners of pictorial representation (fol. 11Ov). His body exists in three dimensions, modeled and positioned at a slight angle to the viewer to suggest added depth in the picture plane; the hands, feet, hair, bracelet, and sandals are delicately and naturalistically rendered. The other forms, in contrast, remain caught in the Aztec style. Tlaloc's xicolli (ritual tunic) and his shield, necklace, face mask, and headdress are all flat, crisp of outline, and static in presentation. While individual feathers in the headdress, tunic, and shield seem to have life, the hem of the tunic and the serpentine face mask of the god stop all sense of movement. The iconographically meaningful features of Tlaloc are presented in the Aztec fashion but are overlaid on a stylistically European figure. The figure stands in space on an architectural platform, but this platform is flatly represented according to the Aztec convention as a band containing concentric circles, bordered by a row of stepped ramparts. There is an unsuccessful attempt to impart volume and depth to the platform through blood-red shadings. This telling juxtaposition of Aztec and European pictorial conventions demonstrates the basic incompatibility of the two visual systems.

Iconographically, the figure is fully Aztec. Tlaloc's face is formed by his diagnostic serpentine mask, in which broad lines define his goggle-eyes, curved brow, scrolled nose, and fanged jaw. In place of a chin, his jade necklace begins directly beneath the jaw. The god's usual dark blue tunic, like the shield, is in this depiction dotted and netted with strips of silver foil, which still glimmer under their tarnish. Gold leaf enlivens and makes more precious his gold earspool, undulating lightning staff, and leg ornaments. The red-and-black "eye" border at the hem of his tunic is often found on garments worn by gods and nobility, and the touches of gold and silver leaf add sumptuous embellishment.

Because it is such an early and unacculturated architectural rendering, the painting of Texcoco's principal temple (fol. 112v) has often been used to illustrate the Templo Mayor in the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan as well as in Texcoco. The Templo is built in the typical Aztec form, shared by the major temples in the two neighboring cities. A high, stepped pyramidal platform is fronted by two broad stairways, each bordered by wide balustrades. At the summit rise twin temples, the left dedicated to Tlaloc and the right to Huitzilopochtli, the principal Aztec god. Tlaloc's temple is crested with blue merlons associated with the water god, while the superstructure of Huitzilopochtli's shrine is adorned with human skulls and crested with great stylized shells. The whole rests on another, lower and broader, platform which also supports a forecourt and auxiliary buildings associated with the two deities.

The volumes, lines, and voids of the architectural complex are described using the same combination of Aztec and European styles apparent in the portrait of Tlaloc. The basic iconography of the merlons and skulls is Aztec, and the twin temple is an Aztec form. Aztec too is the convention for a building, which features a doorway defined by a red post-and-lintel unit rising from a slightly wider block. But the artist was not content to use only the Aztec style. He added pinkish shadows to the walls, balustrades, and platform

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sides, and he painted every other step pink, perhaps with the idea of differentiating the risers from the steps. He also added shading to the shell merlons of Huitzilopochtli’s temple. He rendered the skull decorations in a particularly European way, turning them to a three-quarter view, dropping away the lower jaws, shading them, and drafting their features with European naturalism--they have become European skulls on an Aztec building.

The Codex Ixtlilxochitl is associated with Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (about 1568-1648), an early seventeenth-century historian and descendant of the rulers of Texcoco, because the third section (the Sahagunite calendar) is said to be in his hand. He may even have gathered the three parts of the codex together, for certainly the Pomar Relación de Texcoco fragment is a manuscript he might have owned. It is equally possible, however, that the codex was assembled somewhat later by Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora (1645-1700), a Mexican savant and one-time Jesuit priest, who owned all three parts of the codex, bound together in a volume with other material, as part of his rich library of manuscripts on pre- and post-Conquest Aztec culture. Sigüenza y Góngora, a close friend of the Alva Ixtlilxochitl family, acquired all of Fernando de Alva's papers, probably from Fernando's son Juan de Alva Ixtlilxochitl.⁴ After Sigüenza y Góngora's death, the codex passed through the hands of the Italian Jesuit and bibliophile Lorenzo Boturini (1702-1755) when he was in Mexico; it was later owned by the Mexican antiquarian Juan Eugenio de Santelizes; the French historian Joseph Marius Alexis Aubin (1802-1891), who took it to Paris; and the Parisian collector E. Eugene Goupil (1831-1895). After Goupil's death, it was transferred with the rest of his collection to the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris, where it bears the catalogue number (65-71) it was assigned when Goupil owned it. The folios still retain the page numbers (94-122) they were given when the manuscript was bound and paginated with other manuscripts in Sigüenza y Góngora's library.

EHB

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1. Elizabeth H. Boone, The Codex Magliabechiano and the Lost Prototype of the Magliabechiano Group (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1983), pp. lot, 107-12; see also John B. Glass in collaboration with Donald Robertson, "A Census of Native Middle American Pictorial Manuscripts," in Handbook of Middle American Indians, vol. 14, Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources, edited by Howard F. Cline (Austin, 1975), pp. 147-48.

2. For the Magliabechiano group see Boone, The Codex Magliabechiano, pp. 3-6, 139-64.

3. Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, edited by Angel Maria Garibay Kintana (Mexico, 1975), vol. I; Boone, Codex Magliabechiano, p. 101.

4. For the provenance of the codex see Boone, Codex Magliabechiano, pp. 107-12, and Jacqueline de Durand-Forest, "Commentaire," in Codex Ixtlilxochitl, Bibliothêque Nationale, Paris (Ms. Mex. 65-74), edited by Ferdinand Anders (Graz, 1976), pp. 9-11. The assumption may be true that Fernando de Alva owned all three parts of the codex and that Sigüenza y Góngora acquired these from Fernando's son Juan, although there is no actual evidence that Fernando or Juan de Alva owned the first or second part of the codex. Sigüenza y Góngora also obtained manuscripts for his library when he rescued them from a fire in the Palacio Virreinal of Mexico during the Corn Riot of 1692.