Clouds and Rain Author(s): Todd Olson Source: Representations, Vol. 104, No. 1 (Fall 2008), pp. 102-115 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2008.104.1.102 . Accessed: 04/10/2013 10:13 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Representations. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 142.3.100.23 on Fri, 4 Oct 2013 10:13:02 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Transcript
Clouds and RainAuthor(s): Todd OlsonSource: Representations, Vol. 104, No. 1 (Fall 2008), pp. 102-115Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2008.104.1.102 .
Accessed: 04/10/2013 10:13
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toRepresentations.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 142.3.100.23 on Fri, 4 Oct 2013 10:13:02 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
In icoac tepeticpac moloni, momoloca, motlatlalia, mopiloa: mitoaia, ca ieuitze in tlaloque, ie quiiauiz, ie pixauizque in aoaque.
[When clouds billowed and formed thunderheads, and settled and hungabout the mountain tops, it was said: “The Tlalocs are already coming.Now it will rain. Now the masters of the rain will sprinkle water.” ]1
An unknown indigenous tlacuilo (painter-scribe) was instructedby the Franciscan brother Bernardino de Sahagún to make a picture in con-cert with the written description of clouds with which I begin (fig. 1).2 As inthe codex as a whole, executed around 1579, the collaboration betweenSpaniard and colonized informant in New Spain was a belated attempt tosalvage a visual culture and religious practices largely extinguished by thefirst wave of conquest. The codex is a vestige of a complex preconquestideographic tradition, one that would survive and be redirected to mappingout property boundaries and political relations. The Nahuatl glyph forwater—the relaxed spiral shape in wash hovering near the lower edge ofthe inscribed frame—was used in legal documents to mark wells and othersources of water. The serial repetition of footprint glyphs surveyed mea-sured paths. In other words, the indigenous forms of the Nahua peoplespersisted within an emergent colonial administration.
In the codex at hand, however, the Franciscan commanded the formalarticulation of a pagan religion that had been prohibited and whose objectshad been destroyed. In the chapter “which telleth of the clouds,” the pictureaccompanies the phonetic transcription of the Nahuatl account of the deityTlalocatecutli, who had been associated with clouds and rain. Sahagún’sindigenous informants were members of the former ruling class who hadbeen trained in glyphic inscription and were given humanist educations in amissionary school.3 The tlacuilos and the Franciscans were engaged in a com-plex negotiation in the representation of clouds. The forbidden god wasenmeshed in a dense graphic system that had developed independently of
alphabetic inscription. Applying with a brush the opaque pigment sus-pended in liquid, the tlacuilo iterated the spiral glyph for water, creating ahorizontal and vertical pattern. Each cloud-unit in the rough grid is a varianton the glyph based on the manual gesture of the tlacuilo. As in other sur-vivals of preconquest codices, the glyph constitutes a contour line; that is tosay, the glyph assumes a shape with a bounded extension.4 A figure is cir-cumscribed by a continuous line and paint is applied to the interior.
Contour
Clouds are complex aqueous systems that resist being bounded“things.” Clouds do not have finite edges. In this codex, the contours sur-rounding the clouds do not correspond to fixed shapes, nor do they depictocclusion.5 Elsewhere in the codex, water freezes on the page (fig. 2). Con-tour corresponds to water’s physical transformation into finite shapes—ice,
snow, and hail. In these Nahuatl glyphs, the contour line defines the physicalproperties: the entangled, petrified water glyph, the set of continuous cir-cles, and the sharp terminations of the roughly rectangular forms. The latterformal series contributes to this codex’s historical narrative of catastrophe,wherein solid forms fallen from the sky despoiled fields of corn andcrushed flocks of birds (“And thus did hail fall, making a din as of rattling,beating one about the head, pelting one [as if] with stones”). No doubt thetlacuilo’s subtle inflection of the line with the painful memory of a hailstormwas largely lost on the Franciscan.6 The European may have been moreresponsive to the tlacuilo’s experiments with translucent black wash on thewhite ground, suggesting the relative opacity and tumescence of clusteringstorm clouds. However, we can be assured that the European would haverecognized the bounded shape as a cloud. The demarcated cloud indicatesa shared notion of pictorial form, one premised on enclosure.
It is worth hesitating here. In the course of their negotiation, the Euro-pean Sahagún and the tlacuilos shared a set of common assumptions regard-ing the picture as bounded contour. Despite the messy convergence of glyphand alphabetic transcription of Nahuatl, there is a common ground, or atleast the scribe anticipated some understanding of the enclosed forms on
the Spaniard’s part. This notion of shared pictorial reception might suggesta set of minimal requirements for the migration of the picture as symbol inthe midst of the various noisy cross-cultural misunderstandings (somethingin the order of a distinctive feature, with a degree of apprehension or at leastrecognition of some symbolic function). Pictures, in this sense, are apparentlysubject to transmission because not only do they suggest an economy of sim-ilarity (depiction) but they are also predicated on the principle of substitu-tion and transposition.
The notion of the transposition of symbols with discrete contours hashad much currency in the discipline of art history, particularly withregard to the study of the diachronic and geographical transfer of icono-graphic motifs. In part, the study of attributes and emblems—a palmfrond or an hourglass—was facilitated by the cataloging and reproductionof bounded linear figures. But the contour line also enjoyed an importantconceptual value during the formation of art history in the early twentiethcentury. When Aby Warburg explored the figure of snake/lightning inHopi culture and the persistence of pagan serpentine motifs in ChristianEurope, he located the origins of symbolic form in the drawing of a con-tour. As Karen Lang has argued, Warburg transferred a term of Kantianlogic referring to the determination of the extension of a class, the settingof boundaries, to the inscription of a “differentiating contour.”7 War-burg’s account of the resilience and migration of the symbol hinges onthis distinctive formal feature. The survival of any given symbol is predi-cated on its formal differentiation from the ground that surrounds it.
Warburg’s notion of symbolic form helps us to appreciate what was at stakewhen the Franciscan and the tlacuilo agreed on the contour line. For Warburg,the “primary differentiating contour” has the effect of distancing subject andobject as part of the obligatory estrangement of persons from things.8 For theFranciscan Sahagún, the disenchantment of the idols demanded their domes-tication as symbols, disciplined by contours provided by the indigenousinformant. For the Nahuatl speaker and tlacuilo, the contours of the glyphinsured the survival of indigenous material practices if not the gods them-selves. But in order to understand more fully the effects of this cultural con-vergence, our description of contour line has to move beyond Warburg’sand my own level of abstraction.
Invoking the word “form” can privilege structure to the detriment ofmaterial properties. One consequence of vernacular Aristotelianism is thatthe limits imposed on form by material constraints tend to be downplayed,even in scholarship attendant to historical description. The pressures of thematerial on form are particularly germane in the discussion of transculturalsystems, where residual techniques face changes in material conditionsbrought about by conquest and colonization.
Clouds and Rain 105
REP104_10 10/29/08 12:04 Page 105
This content downloaded from 142.3.100.23 on Fri, 4 Oct 2013 10:13:02 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The application of liquid to a porous, aggregate support is sub-ject to accident. The tlacuilos were acutely aware of this as they adapted theirtechniques in response to the differences between the local paper madefrom the bark of fig trees (amatl) and imported paper made from textiles(rag). They knew that technical innovation can accommodate variations inmaterial resources. They also knew that matter, form, and signification werenot categorically distinct. In Nahuatl, “red ink, black ink” signifies wisdomor “knowledge of incalculable value.”9
In writing with ink, the legibility of the script was predicated on control-ling accidental seepage and the resulting disarticulation of stereotypic forms.Impression relied on the integrity of the paper’s reserve, the blank passagesof the sheet. Viscosity and receptivity were constitutive of the formal proper-ties of script, determining the open and closed structures of the characters:the broad circumference of the “o”; the intricate negative capacities of the “e”and the “a.” In geographically diverse traditions, scribes adeptly directed theabsorption of sepia or carbon-based pigments suspended in water throughthe coordination of manual pressure and relative velocity (weight and rapid-ity of movement factor into absorption).
With the introduction of printed books to New Spain, the tlacuilosbecame aware that “red ink, black ink” was itself subject to material transfor-mation. In the absence of the scribe’s manual dexterity, the mechanicalimpression of typeface required innovations in the composition of ink. Oilwas introduced to printer’s ink in order to forestall the uneven distributionof pigment applied to moveable type. The water-based ink used by scribesreticulated on the type’s metal surface, collecting in a minute fractured pat-tern. In the absence of oil, the indexical uniformity of the molded font andthe predictable mechanical pressure of the press were compromised by theunanticipated consequences of rag paper’s irregular receptivity to the varie-gated inked typeface.
These technical responses to the indiscriminate receptivity of ink by ragpaper in both writing and the printing of words and contour figures wereinadequate, however, to accommodate a demand in Europe to produce anextended field of graduated tone in ink drawing. Like the contour line, thehistorical emergence of differential tone on a surface as a pictorial conven-tion was a response to a historically specific set of cultural pressures. Thetonal variation that developed as a systematic pictorial practice in Quattro-cento Italy and elsewhere in Europe was alien to the Mesoamerican glyphictradition. In Italian painting, we can speak of tonal gradation as a volumetricobject’s interference with its own illumination. This is often referred to as“modeling” or “shading.” Discrepancy of tone on a single depicted surface
R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S106
REP104_10 10/29/08 12:04 Page 106
This content downloaded from 142.3.100.23 on Fri, 4 Oct 2013 10:13:02 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
also signified the interference of adjacent objects relative to a light source,thereby suggesting discrete things in space. The systematic gradation of toneis a simplification of the properties of light and shadow as perceived by thehuman eye. In contradistinction to the contour and opaque in-painting ofthe tlacuilo, tonal variation underscored the contingency of pictorializationwith respect to human vision. As hieratic scale gave way to linear perspectivein European art, symbolic color became subordinate to tonal variation. Thiswas a peculiar development that would have had no foreseeable advantagesfor early fifteenth-century functionaries in Monteczuma’s empire, whoseglyphs for paper were sufficient to represent the distribution of tribute.
Chalk and rag paper were the dominant new media in fifteenth- andsixteenth-century Italian studios (fig. 3). Importantly, whether red or blackchalk was employed in preparatory drawings, experimentation took placewith monochrome materials. The graduated application of manual pressureand the iteration of dispersed graphic marks in a uniform hue producedvariation of tone. The disintegration of the soft solid in contact with therough texture of the paper provided varying degrees of density and reserve.Shadow was similarly suggested by the use of translucent liquid media, suchas wash on paper, by adjusting the density of pigment and the relative viscos-ity of the suspension with respect to a white paper ground. Whether usingthe constancy of hue of chalk or wash, the adjustment of tone withoutrecourse to mixing pigment with white entailed the use of the white groundas an integral aspect of the picture.
The transposition of these perceptual interests to the medium of ink onpaper entailed considerable difficulties. Ink is unforgiving. Artists oftenmade a preparatory sketch with a dry stylus before committing to the irre-versible stain. In order to depict a plane, saturation of the paper with ink wasimpractical and, significantly, ink’s opacity did not offer tools for depictingtonal gradation. A series of parallel and perpendicular lines seems to havebeen used to resolve the problem of controlling the uneven absorption ofink by the complex aggregate structure of rag sheets.10 In a pen drawing bythe fifteenth-century Florentine artist Ghirlandaio, for example, sustainedareas of dark tonality are suggested by directing the flow of ink with a sharpinstrument (fig. 4). The depiction of shadow through tone has been substi-tuted by a notation based on the iteration of lines. The relative frequency ofthe intervals of discontinuous lines is in inverse relation to relative illumina-tion. Hatching, in this instance, is a notational system for differential tonethat developed in response to the accidental or unmotivated properties ofpaper’s receptivity to ink.
The preconquest tlacuilos had no need for hatching because they had nointerest in differential tone. This is not to say that the tlacuilo did not differ-entiate objects based on observation.11 But the contingencies of light with
Clouds and Rain 107
REP104_10 10/29/08 12:04 Page 107
This content downloaded from 142.3.100.23 on Fri, 4 Oct 2013 10:13:02 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
FIGURE 3. Andrea del Sarto,Drapery Study (recto), 1522–25,red chalk. J. Paul Getty Museum,89.GB.53, Los Angeles.
respect to objects did not warrant depiction. Indeed, systematic hatching asa notation for differential illumination created unnecessary confusion in aglyphic system. The conceptual clarity of discrete place markers, phoneticglyphs, attributes, and anthropomorphic figures would be obfuscated bygraphic uniformity. Marks depicting the relative illumination of surfaces canbe mistaken for the identical marks depicting material specificity and differ-ential texture, as in a thatched roof.12 Contour line and saturated in-paintingwere sufficient before external pressures introduced hatching.
In early modern Europe, the mechanical reproduction of pictures madehatching a necessary formal innovation.13 In globally disseminated Europeanwoodcuts, ink adhering to the exposed wood had to be directed into discreteunits before transference to the paper by the printing press. The displacement
REP104_10 10/31/08 14:45 Page 108
This content downloaded from 142.3.100.23 on Fri, 4 Oct 2013 10:13:02 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
of the wood with a chisel produced the reserve of paper at regular intervals.As a result, a system of parallel lines registered the relative tone of differenti-ated surfaces, even if it created ambiguities regarding texture.
This important technical innovation and compromise is significant forunderstanding the processes of cultural convergence in the FlorentineCodex.14 The tlacuilo who painted the clouds incorporated hatching into theglyph/contour scheme. The transfer of this formal pattern was indebted to amedium that was central to the colonization and Christianization of NewSpain. Woodcuts were prominent features of the catechisms printed in Mexicoaccompanying transliterations of Nahuatl with Spanish en face translations.15
On the first page of the Doctrina Cristiana en Lengua Española y Mexicana(1548), a woodcut print of a scene of confession and absolution uses hatchingto suggest a coordinated, single-source system of lighting (fig. 5).16 Paralleldiagonal lines mark shadow to the right of depicted bodies. Hatching coexistswith contour. The structural requirements for embossing the surface of thepaper with the inked wood relief included the use of contour line.
Although hatching was a technical requirement for the mechanicalreproduction and dissemination of Christian iconography, it was not neces-sary for the tlacuilo who painted clouds and rain. In the glyphic tradition, huewas adequate to the task of conveying the shape of objects as well as the rela-tive opacity of clouds in the process of precipitation. In “Clouds and Rain,”hatching is made redundant by the use of wash. The painter is largely appro-priating formal features of the monochrome print. As a result, there is a dis-junction between form and the specific local material requirements.Initially, one might argue that the picture is “dematerialized” or becomes“image.” Form seems to be relatively autonomous with regard to materialprocesses in this instance. Indeed, the fluidity of this formal transpositionfrom mechanical print to the handmade picture resembles the migration oficonography through the operations of copying. Yet, the transmission ofhatching does not encourage a simple relationship between “Clouds andRain” and an identifiable “source.” The complex negotiation of the tlacuilowith the visual culture of the conquistador is not restricted to the migrationof the “differentiating contour.” The tlacuilo does not simply “borrow” andinscribe a uniform shape. In fact, without the boundaries of contour line,broken parallel lines resist conforming to a uniform shape. So why borrow?
Cross-hatching
Looking back to “Clouds and Rain,” the reader should be awarethat the description of hatching as a system of parallel marks is inadequate tothe complexity of the picture. In fact, the disjunction of form and local mate-rial requirements is amplified by the disruption of one system of parallel
R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S110
FIGURE 5. “Confession,” Doctrina Cristianaen Lengua Española y Mexicana (1548),woodcut print. Photo: Author.
REP104_10 10/29/08 12:04 Page 110
This content downloaded from 142.3.100.23 on Fri, 4 Oct 2013 10:13:02 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
lines by another. In key passages—inside the contours on the left and mostsignificantly below the cloud bank—we find two perpendicular systems ofparallel lines. The cross-hatching is adapted from print technology, butmore specifically from engravings or etchings rather than woodcuts.
By the sixteenth century, the production of woodcuts was declining inEurope in part as a result of competition by line-engraving in book illustra-tion.17 The metal plate offered several advantages for the mass productionof pictures, including the durability of the plate. However, the problem ofcontrolling ink’s entropic properties is exponentially increased by the appli-cation of ink to a metal plate for the purposes of producing an intaglio print.Cross-hatching of the metal plate, whether through direct engraving or theindirect process of etching, provided channels for the ink to accumulate in apredictable linear pattern (fig. 6). This is in stark contrast to the woodcut’spositive relief impression. The specific technical requirements of printingfrom a metal plate and the extensive circulation of these prints expandedthe audience sufficiently competent to understand cross-hatching. As aresult, cross-hatching largely became the presumed notation for tonal varia-tion. This had consequences for the development of visual epistemologies inthe process of colonization.
I am making a distinction between the migration of the symbol and theappropriation by the tlacuilo of a notational system. Hatching was associated
Clouds and Rain 111
FIGURE 6. Hendrick Goltzius,Detail of a Man admiring theFarnese Hercules, 1617engraving. Photo: Author.
REP104_10 10/29/08 12:04 Page 111
This content downloaded from 142.3.100.23 on Fri, 4 Oct 2013 10:13:02 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
with the reproductive technologies required for Christianization and colo-nial administration.18 As a result, the parallel broken lines alien to theglyphic tradition were available forms of cultural authority. The migration ofhatching from European prints to the codices of New Spain was notrestricted to the transfer of an immaterial iconography. In “Clouds andRain,” the tlacuilo simulated the pictorial effects of different materials andtechnologies: glyph, woodcut, and engraving. Pushing the brush simulatedthe pictorial effects that in the printing process resulted from (1) inscribingthe plate; (2) inking the plate; (3) wiping the plate (in the case of engrav-ing); (4) placing the paper over the ink-sodden wood or metal plate; (5)applying a damp cloth blanket; (6) rolling the cylinder; and (7) pulling thesheet.19 Although hatching is not the representation of one thing, it is diffi-cult to dissociate its distinctive formal features from material processes thatare deeply invested in the structure of colonization. Hatching is figurative, ifnot allegorical.
As we have seen, hatching was a technological response to a demand todepict the systematic behavior of light in response to objects (one of thecluster of conventions including linear perspective that constituted perva-sive European modes of representation). Unlike Warburg’s symbol as “dif-ferentiating contour” that signifies discontinuity, hatching attends to thecontiguity of objects, not their singularity. Hatching offered a world basedon the principle of similarity. Objects were treated alike irrespective of theirontological status. Hatching can depict dirt or the angel’s wing, the thun-dercloud or its precipitate. Importantly, for the tlacuilo, the differencesbetween the clouds and the gods were subsumed by the discipline of theimported forms.
Yet, “Clouds and Rain” draws attention to the instability of a notationalsystem premised on the authority of visual perception. Even as a plane orcontiguous field of shadow is suggested by the system of lines, the disconti-nuity of the field (the separation of discrete lines) dissociates the inscribedlines from their perceptual referent. Continuity has been substituted byreticulation (the net of lines). There is always a tension between conven-tional representation of shadow through hatching and the perceived behaviorof discrepant luminosity. The relative frequency of intervals conventionallyconveys relative degrees of opacity, but these discrete inscriptions are predi-cated on the breaking up of the apparently seamless surface of a regular vol-ume. Far from providing a rational grid, the network of lines, which hadbeen designed to respond to the inconstant behavior of substances,hatching has been set adrift from its intended function. The simulation ofthe mechanical form—whether the result of “misreading” or motivated“mimicry”—results in inadvertent consequences.20 There is a transforma-tion of conceptual value on the level of the signifier rather than the sign.21
R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S112
REP104_10 10/29/08 12:04 Page 112
This content downloaded from 142.3.100.23 on Fri, 4 Oct 2013 10:13:02 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Furthermore, the tlacuilo’s appropriation of cross-hatching from prints ges-tures toward a picture unmoored from optical perception. One of theachievements of this cross-cultural negotiation is the dissociation of cross-hatching from its perceptual referent; in other words, the tlacuilo’s borrow-ing points to the conventionality of the pictorial signifier. Hatching can besaid to become a glyph.
Precipitation
We return to the beginning. “The Tlalocs are already coming.” Ifwe pause at this phrase accompanying “Clouds and Rain,” the interpretationof the contact between thundercloud and mountain remains ambiguous.The coming of the Tlalocs portends rain or hail, the conditions for subsis-tence or famine, respectively. In “Clouds and Rain,” the tension betweenthese divergent narrative possibilities and their respective historical out-comes is most intensely manifested where the dense wash comes in contactwith the highest frequency of cross-hatchings. The rain-bearing Tlalocs, theaccumulation of black ink to the point of apparent accidental seepage andinchoate figuration, yields at the edge of the reserve, evaporating. Whiteclouds make hail. Blank paper is a catastrophic event. Nonanthropomorphicform is deeply invested in historical causation and suspended narrative con-sequences. Below, the net of lines relaxes, maintaining their distinctnessthrough the reduction of frequency, the lengthening of each broken lineand the extension of intervals across the sheet. The vertical lines commenceat the contour line and terminate at different points below, suggesting adownward trajectory. Now it will rain. In “Clouds and Rain,” a technologi-cally expedient and highly conventionalized system of shading, dissociatedfrom material necessity, has been transformed suddenly into the mimeticfalling of rain. “Now the masters of the rain will sprinkle water.”
The glyph for the deity Tlalocatecutli or any anthropomorphic pictorialattributes is markedly absent. Elsewhere, indigenous artists made pictures ofChrist, the Virgin Mary, and the saints in churches where pagan deities per-sisted at the margins, transformed into mere ornament. In the FlorentineCodex, however, New World pagan gods had to become unrecognizable.More precisely, for the purposes of ethnographic salvage, Sahagún’s recon-stitution of Mesoamerican idols with a differential contour was too danger-ous. Hatching rather than contour created the sufficient distance betweenthe old gods and the new. But hatching also permitted the survival of thewisdom that it was meant to displace. The metamorphosis of ink into rainmight be understood as a site for sustained practice and the persistence of“red ink, black ink.”22
Clouds and Rain 113
REP104_10 10/29/08 12:04 Page 113
This content downloaded from 142.3.100.23 on Fri, 4 Oct 2013 10:13:02 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Aspects of this essay benefited from participation in the Seeing Across Cultures:Visuality in the Early Modern Period panel at the College Art Association annualmeeting (2008) chaired by Jeanette Peterson and Dana Leibsohn. Thanks alsogo to Maria Loh for her invitation to the Early Modern Visual Culture Group,University of London, and to Kinga Novak for our conversations.
1. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things ofNew Spain [Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España (1579)], trans. A. Ander-son and C. Dibble (Santa Fe, 1953), part 8, 20.
2. The codex was produced at the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco by sevenNahua elders under Sahagún’s direction. Gauvin A. Bailey, Art of Colonial LatinAmerica (London, 2005), 215–17.
3. Serge Gruzinski, Les Quatres parties du monde (Paris, 2004), 65.4. Some Mesoamerican scholars have made a distinction between a glyphic
“frame line” and the European “contour line” in order to underscore the dif-ferences between the assertion of a two-dimensional figure and a line thatleaves open the possibility of a self-occluding surface or three-dimensionalbody. See Ellen T. Baird, The Drawings of Sahagún’s Primeros Memoriales:Structure and Style (Norman, OK, 1993). As I will argue, while the contour canbe used to depict objects in depth (cf. Pisanello), there is always a tensionbetween contour line and implied depth and volumetric form. For a discus-sion of the distinction between occluding contours and “true edge contours,”see Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions: The Varieties of Graphic Expression(Ithaca, 2005), 77.
5. “The painter’s art involved reconciling two methods of representing the trans-parency of water and the formless mass of clouds.” Serge Gruzinski, The MestizoMind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization, trans. D. Dusin-berre (London, 2002), 144.
6. For a discussion of “the constitutive ambiguity of depiction at the levels of bothmark and character (compliance class or objective correlate) relative to oneanother,” see Whitney Davis, “How to Make Analogies in a Digital Age,” October117 (2006): 77–78.
7. Karen Lang, Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History (Ithaca,2006), 114–15.
8. “If symbolism entails the drawing of a differentiating contour, then for War-burg ‘the work of art is a product of repeating attempts on the part of the sub-ject to create a [feeling of] distance between subject and object.’” Lang, Chaosand Cosmos, 115.
9. Serge Gruzinski, Painting the Conquest: The Mexican Indians and the EuropeanRenaissance, trans. Deke Dusinberre (Paris, 1992), 14. Walter D. Mignolo associ-ates the Nahuatl amoxtli, the material surface on which painted narratives wereinscribed, with knowledge. He privileges the transformation of the conceptualvalue of the support through the practice of writing and reading. “The repre-sentation of the semiotic system of interaction achieved by inscribing andtransmitting graphic signs on solid surfaces began to change with the increas-ing complexity of literacy and became strongly associated with religion and
R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S114
REP104_10 10/29/08 12:04 Page 114
This content downloaded from 142.3.100.23 on Fri, 4 Oct 2013 10:13:02 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
knowledge.” Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Terri-toriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor, 1995), 74, 80.
10. Hatching was also a notational tool for abbreviated sketches in chalk, whichenabled the delegation of labor.
11. See Elizabeth Hill Boone, “Towards a More Precise Definition of the AztecPainting Style,” in Pre-Columbian Art History: Selected Readings (Palo Alto, 1982),153–68.
12. We can infer from some examples of early postconquest codices that conver-gent lines were used to denote the structural pattern of thatched roofs. SeeBaird, The Drawings of Sahagún’s Primeros Memoriales, fig. 16.
13. Aside from Salamanca, the European production of prints and books for NewSpain was concentrated outside Spain (Antwerp, Lyon, Paris, and Venice). W.Michael Mathes, The America’s First Academic Library: Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco(Sacramento, 1985), 87.
14. Serge Gruzinski recognizes that the “borrowing” of monochrome crosshatchingfrom European engravings were “adaptations and transpositions.” Gruzinski,Painting the Conquest, 144.
15. Gruzinski discusses a Franciscan catechism of 1553 and importantly argues thatthe uneven complexity and technical competencies evident in the printsdemonstrates that European images were not totalizing but “multiform.” SergeGruzinski, Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Runner (1492–2019),trans. H. Maclean (Durham, NC, 2001), 76.
16. Doctrina Cristiana en lengua España y Mexicana por los Religiosos de la Orden deSanto Domingo (1548), facsimile ed. (Madrid, 1944).
17. Arthur M. Hind, An Introduction to a History of Woodcut (New York, 1935), 41. 18. For a discussion of printing, textuality, and conquest, see Mignolo, Dark Side of
the Renaissance. For engraving as a technology in New World ethnography, seeMichael Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization(Minneapolis, 2008).
19. My emphasis differs from Michel de Certeau’s account of the replacement of“sixteenth and seventeenth-century engravings’ representations of meetingsbetween Europeans and Savages” by “writing with the debris of the Other.”Michel de Certeau, “Writing vs. Time: History and Anthropology in the Worksof Lafitau,” Yale French Studies 59 (1980): 50.
20. “Mestizo creativity seems to have its own dynamic, partly removed from the aes-thetic habits and intentions of the artist. Mélanges give birth to constraints andpotentials, to antagonisms and complementarities, which result in unpre-dictable configurations.” Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind, 2002, 145.
21. For the transformation of the sign’s conceptual value, see Marshall Sahlins,Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sand-wich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor, 1981).
22. The recuperation of primitivist morphologies in modernist formalism was oftenpredicated on the extinction of a colonized people. “These twentieth-centurycontinuations of the unfinished classes of fifteenth-century American Indian artcan be interpreted as an inverted colonial action by stone-age people uponmodern industrial nations at a great chronological distance. Through its formalvocabulary alone, the sensibility of an extinct civilization survives in works of artto shape the work of living artists in a totally unrelated civilization half a millen-nium later.” George Kubler, The Shape of Time (New Haven, 1962), 108.
Clouds and Rain 115
REP104_10 10/29/08 12:04 Page 115
This content downloaded from 142.3.100.23 on Fri, 4 Oct 2013 10:13:02 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
