The Lienzo of Tlapiltepec: A Painted History from the Northern Mixteca

Arni Brownstone, assistant curator of World Cultures at the Royal Ontario Museum, witnessed the flow of scholars coming to study the sixteenth-century Lienzo of Tlapiltepec. Originally from the Mixteca Alta in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, the lienzo is a history painted on a large cotton cloth depicting the narrative of the royal house of Coixtlahuaca, a politically important city during Mesoamerica’s Postclassic period (ca. 950–1521 CE). Brownstone’s preface offers a refreshingly truthful account of the intrigue that brought the lienzo to Toronto. The book celebrates the scholarship attending the installation of a digitally enhanced copy in the museum, a strategy that not only preserves the delicate lienzo but also captures the original colors that faded over centuries. A valuable aspect of this book is the inclusion of this reproduction and numerous full-color details of the lienzo, images of other related manuscripts and lienzos, and beautifully illustrative maps. By modern publication standards the lavish number of illustrations makes this an incredibly useful text for scholars interested in the Mixtec past.Just as the manuscript has inspired a pilgrimage of sorts to the museum, this text reflects the diversity of research approaches that such a document incites. Collectively the chapters in the book demonstrate the benefit of viewing a manuscript from multiple perspectives. The book begins with the preeminent Mesoamerican manuscript scholar Elizabeth Boone’s foreword, which effectively positions the document within the Aztec and Mixtec traditions that the lienzo fuses. Nicholas Johnson’s first essay offers a fine introduction to the painted history and its physical properties and helps readers identify the basic imagery and its reading, a necessity for those unfamiliar with this system of communication. Bas van Doesburg contributes a thorough interpretation of the history depicted in the lienzo, revealing the internal shifts in power between various ruling parties of the Coixtlahuaca Valley. He explains how a number of ruling houses representing different ethnic identities coalesced to form a polity, a situation that might explain the very reason the rulers of Coixtlahuaca commissioned the lienzo. These rulers were intent on documenting the foundation and expansion of their territory, their response to the intrusive interests of the Aztec imperial state, and eventually the consolidation of power by the Coixtlahuaca lords. Van Doesburg successfully uses early colonial documents to reconstruct the pre-Hispanic political structure of the area, and his inclusion of seveteen transcriptions of these archival materials fleshes out the colonial documentation of the Coixtlahuaca Valley, making them readily accessible to scholars.Other sections include an important analysis of ten sixteenth-century glosses by linguist Michael Swanton and van Doesburg. They determine that the language of these glosses is Chocholtec, and compellingly identify them as toponyms. The second chapter by Johnson examines how the lines on the lienzo create a spatial structure that fully integrates with the historical narrative. Finally, Brownstone and Eckhard Dolinski provide a historiography of the various illustrations that have been made of the Lienzo of Tlapiltepec, ultimately resulting in the current reproduction now displayed at the museum. In a field where scholars commonly use both photographic and redrawn facsimiles, the inclusion of this chapter might inspire reflection about the accuracy of research materials.In sum, the differing analyses of this singular lienzo combine into a successful text that serves as a model for interdisciplinary yet integrated research. Because it introduces the fundamentals of reading Mixtec imagery and provides a wealth of illustrations and archival materials, it will appeal to novices and seasoned scholars interested in the political machinations of pre-Columbian to colonial-period Mexico.

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