Professor David Colmenares (Comparative Literature / Religious Studies) is currently researching conjecture on Pre-Columbian Monotheism in Mesoamerica within an Aztec manuscript created in colonial Mexico.
The Codex Vaticanus A (pictured here), a 90-page pictorial manuscript in the Aztec tradition created in colonial Mexico, is a unique document on several accounts.
First, while created by indigenous painters (tlacuiloque) using traditional pigments in central-southeastern Mexico, it was painted on the finest Fabriano paper and entirely annotated in Italian (with occasional Náhuatl interpolations).
Secondly, a considerable part of its content, including the important cosmological section that includes the picture above, is unique and does not appear in any other surviving historical document. For this reason, since the 18th century, the Vatican Codex has functioned as a kind of Mesoamerican Rosetta stone, furnishing some of the keys that have unlocked our understanding of pre-Columbian Mexico.
And yet, there is more than meets the eye in images such as the diagram of Aztec cosmology found in the Codex’s first folio. I have shown in a recent study (that will accompany the new edition of the codex to be published by Mexico’s UNAM and the Vatican Library), that the painters of the Vatican Codex were invested in exploring, through a creative use of pictography, a number of historical conjectures.
The one that I’ve been studying recently is a daring hypothesis about the existence of pre-Columbian monotheism. In my work on this forgotten chapter of Early Modern political theology, I have been looking at the ways in which sixteenth-century pictography in colonial Mexico, under the weight of a new evidentiary function, was folded upon itself to perform a visual archaeology of Mexican antiquity.
Students interested in conducting research with Professor Colmenares or other RS faculty can check out the RS Student Research hub.