Paper short abstract:

Discussing the results of non-invasive chemical analyses recently performed on Mesoamerican manuscripts, the paper argues that the predominance of vegetal colours depended on a Mesoamerican notion of the materiality of colour based on a cultural association linking flowers, painting and chanting.

Paper long abstract:

Non-invasive chemical analyses recently performed by the MOLAB Mobile Laboratory on various pre-Hispanic and colonial Mesoamerican manuscripts radically changed our understanding of indigenous painting practices. The chemical identification of painting materials revealed that pre-Hispanic painters working on pictorial manuscripts clearly privileged organic colours, in stark contrast with the abundance of inorganic colours in coeval paintings on other media.

The author of the paper, an anthropologist and member of the MOLAB research team, interprets the scientific data drawing information from both pre-Hispanic artefacts and colonial textual sources, suggesting that the preference for vegetal, brilliant colours was due to a widespread Mesoamerican notion linking the chromatic and aromatic emission of flowers with the vocal emission of chant. Such a notion is attested, for example, by the well-known Náhuatl metaphor in xóchitl, in cuicatl ("the flower, the chant") referring to elegant, formal poetic language. Being "painted with flowers", ritual manuscripts were thus literally composed by a "flowery matter" that was perceived as adequate for their highly structured, chant-like oral enunciation in ritual contexts.

Such cultural-historical interpretation of chemical data allows a deeper understanding of a specifically Mesoamerican perception of the materiality of manuscripts' colours. It also allows a better understanding of the changes that painting practices underwent during early colonial times, when the introduction of inorganic colours in the painters' palette was due - more than to a European technological influence - to the changed conditions of performance of manuscripts that were progressively transformed in "books" in a European sense.