foRgeTTing TenochTiTLan • 121have developed techniques for the cultivation of artificial
memory through the use of images, Valadés tells us of the
method that Franciscans developed to take advantage of
their abilities: “The friars, having to evangelize the Indians,
use figures [imagery] in their sermons that are noteworthy
and previously unknown, in order to teach them the divine
doctrine with greater perfection and objectivity. Towards
this end, they have canvases upon which they have painted
the principal points of Christian religion, such as the sym-
bols of the apostles, the Ten Commandments, the Seven
Deadly Sins, in descending order and with aggravating
circumstances, the Seven Works of Mercy and the Seven
Sacraments.” 27 It is difficult to make out the objects on
Gante’s sheet, but the accompanying text tells us that they
“discunt omnia” (discuss everything); some look like the
arma Christi (a cloak, a sword), whose mnemonic nature
dovetailed with mendicant modes of instruction. But they
are more likely tools and products (a knife, a padlock), as
Gante instructs natives in the mechanical arts that would
be taught at San José, the school he founded, which stood,
like the chapel with which it shared its name, within the
larger precinct of San Francisco.
At other stations in the picture, unnamed Franciscans
use similar methods of teaching via images—the friar at
upper right points to more clearly recognizable imagery as
he teaches the creation of the world (the image shows God
the Father in a mandorla as the things of the newly created
world take shape beneath him), and the friar beneath him
points to a tree. Both of these tiny images are reworked as
full-page images in the folios of the Rhetorica that follow,
concordant with Valadés’s goal of supplying helpful didac-
tic materials to his readers. As Gante points to an image
on the lienzo and Valadés describes and depicts mnemonic
devices, they both reveal a particular theory of mind and
memory that is worth exploring, given how it will come
into play in Mexico City.
Valadés often describes knowledge as being “engraved”
(grabado) on the mind—he shows a preacher using a
pointer so that “se les graben mejor en la memoria” (they
better engrave it into memory), and one of his included
images is in fact an image of the human brain in cross sec-
tion, with parts labeled, offering a concrete expression of
the mind, created when the work’s engraver took a smooth
sheet of metal and cut in the design. 28 While he does not
discuss forgetting, the model of the engraved mind that
he proposes suggests that memory’s traces can be actively
removed, much as the engraver grinds down his plate, a
process very familiar to this author/artist of a book con-
taining engraved plates.
His use of the mnemonic device also follows another
model, again in classical treatises, wherein the mind is
imagined as a storehouse, with the mnemonic image stand-
ing for a larger body of knowledge stored in the memory.
For instance, Valadés tells his reader that to remember the
Gospel of Matthew, one stores in one’s mind an image of
a columned building, with each of the columns of a differ-
ent kind of stone, including porphyry and jasper, relating
to different parts of the Gospel. 29 Such mnemotechnics
were cultivated in Franciscan modes of instruction, which
taught students how to create such pictorial images to store
“artificial” memory—that is, ideas learned by instruction,
a feat we are more likely now to term “rote memory” than
“artificial,” but they are much the same. This kind of teach-
ing and mnemonic recall is commonplace in the classical-
period Ars Memorativa, which recommends the use of con-
structed images to recall learned information thus stored
in the warehouse of the mind. Most important in these
exercises, and carried through to Valadés, is the construc-
tion of imagined spaces in which to lodge the mnemonic
image—a spatialized practice that has been described as
building “a memory palace.” In fact, both memory storage
and memory retrieval dealt with architectural spaces—the
model of the warehouse and then the constructed “space”
of the memory palace used in recall.
This brief introduction to ideas of mind and memory
that Franciscans like Pedro de Gante and Valadés carried
with them in the New World, particularly in memory that
was envisioned as a broad space that could be stocked
with images and a mind that is like an engraver’s plate,
is important to help understand their efforts at making
Mexica forget their perceived idolatry and their concern
with the urban spaces of Mexico City that, like the con-
structed memory palace, held the traces of these earlier
(and now forbidden) religious practices. Because of this
model of mind and memory, the Franciscans’ reconstruc-
tion of the Mexica city happened on two fronts, interior
and exterior. They would erase (borrar) the memories of
idolatry from the minds of the city’s residents, like a writer
“unmakes the characters and figures formed on paper, or
canvas, or another material” 30 or a craftsman grinds down
a metal plate in preparation to re-engrave it. Using words
borrowed from the printing process, Valadés intended to
engrave these minds (grabar) with new, Christian teach-
ing, learned in schools like San José, at the same time that