Posted on 06/02/2010 5:30:47 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Created under the orders of Bernardino de Sahagun by 20 tlacuilos or painters and 4 Indigenous masters, Florentine Codex is one of the greatest expressions of the Renascence in America.
Bilingual and bicultural, this ancient encyclopedia was written in two columns, one in Nahuatl and the other in Spanish as a summary, and is integrated by 4,000 handwritten pages with 2,686 colored images; each book has a prologue where Sahagun places the work in its dimension and time.
Restorer Diana Magaloni had access to the original document at the Laurentian Library (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana) in Florence, Italy, to deepen research: She refers that being as it is one of the most important Mexican pictographic documents guarded abroad, it must be included in the Mexican Digital Library.
During her investigation, the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) specialist revised the pigments used to manufacture the codex, by studying the 11th Book, where the treaties related to the way to prepare colors are...
Besides the study of the 11th Book, ENCRyM restorers have worked for 30 years with Indigenous communities to learn how to obtain natural dyes.
The work is integrated by 3 volumes and 12 books, as European encyclopedias. As medieval editions, it divides knowledge of the world in deities, humans, and nature.
This enormous16th century intellectual enterprise took place during the great plague that annihilated 80 per cent of Indigenous population; the document testifies for the compromise of 20 Nahua authors that decided to finish the work in spite of the death of masters, friends and relatives.
A group of tlacuilos and grammarians locked themselves up in the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Santiago Tlaltelolco to finish the work regardless of death, commented Magaloni.
(Excerpt) Read more at artdaily.org ...
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The planet Venus as disaster-bringer is equally apparent in Mesoamerica, where the observation and veneration of Venus amounted to a collective obsession. For the Aztecs and Maya alike, the heliacal rise of Venus was an occasion of ominous portents marked by dread and hysteria. Bernardino de Sahagún, a Franciscan friar writing in the 16th century, chronicled the Aztecs’ perception of Venus:
“And when it [Venus] newly emerged, much fear came over them; all were frightened. Everywhere the outlets and openings of [houses] were closed up. It was said that perchance [the light] might bring a cause of sickness, something evil when it came to emerge.”
In the attempt to propitiate Venus, the Aztecs offered it human sacrifices, a practice associated with the planet in the Old World as well. What is there about the planet Venus that could have inspired such grim rites? Venus’ present appearance would never inspire mass hysteria or vivid tales of impending doom and world destruction. How, then, are we to account for the fact that Sahagún’s testimony documenting the Aztec’s attitude towards Venus echoes the Sumerian skywatchers’ conception of Inanna/Venus: “To provoke shivers of fright, panic, trembling, and terror before the halo of your fearsome splendor, that is in your nature, oh Inanna!”
http://www.aeonjournal.com/venus.htm
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