122 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
he reacquainted these minds with the goodness of God,
a knowledge that was already imprinted on the soul. On
the exterior, they would destroy the idolatrous shrines and
temples, which carried the memory of past belief, from
the spaces of the city. And they would then inaugurate a
new Christian city, whose consecrated spaces could lead to
knowledge of the true God.
aLLegoRies of Rome
This two-level project is made clear in Valadés’s image of
the courtyard, where, as we have seen, the interior actions
of erasing/imprinting of minds are shown in the teach-
ing of the gathered neophytes, a process parallel to that
of engraving. At the center of the page, another image, an
allegorical one, signals the exterior process of reshaping the
sacred spaces of the Indo-Christian city (figure 6.1). Here,
twelve men in the Franciscan habit line up along one side of
a large maquette of a circular temple, bearing it upon their
shoulders, and two more friars appear at front and back of
this architectural palanquin. Two of the figures supporting
the palanquin are identified in the text: the leading figure is
Saint Francis himself, and bringing up the rear is Martín de
Valencia (ca. 1474–1534), who headed the Franciscan order
and the initial phases of the mission from his arrival in
1524, the year after Gante, until his death. He was prior of
San Francisco in its earliest years, until moving to Tlaxcala
in 1527. The other twelve figures are unnamed, but certainly
are meant to represent the group of twelve Franciscans
arriving in New Spain in 1524, the apostolic mission whose
number echoed that of Christ’s own apostles. The presence
of Saint Francis as the leader of this group signals that this
imagining is meant to show us an allegory—rather than a
real event—of the mission into New Spain.
The architectural maquette that rests on their shoulders
was likely inspired by architectural prints that Valadés saw
in Europe, but seems to be providing an idea of a building
rather than specifically rendering an existing one: it has a
porch supported by four Doric columns and an unusual
rounded pediment, while behind is the square-plan church
with four towers arranged around a central dome. The plan
vaguely evokes the plan of Saint Peter’s as well as the Pan-
theon, a Roman temple whose classical façade was flanked
by two towers (since removed) in the sixteenth century.
Since he was living in Rome while composing the book,
Valadés would have known both these buildings firsthand.
The legend below explains that these Franciscans are the
carriers of the first Roman church into the Indies: “Primi
santae romane aeclesie inovo indiarum orbe portatores.”
At the center of the church’s portal is an image of the Holy
Spirit, which animates the work of the evangelizing Fran-
ciscans, a Spirit that travels along small lines inscribed in
the image toward the Franciscans, similar to Pentecost,
when the Holy Spirit entered into the first apostles.
The combination of the classicized architecture and
the twelve apostolic friars dovetails with the larger Fran-
ciscan equation between their New World church and
the primitive Roman Catholic Church believed to have
been established by Jesus and his apostles. As John Leddy
Phelan notes, “All the mendicant chroniclers of the late
sixteenth century were dazzled by the image of the Primi-
tive Church.” Phelan cites Vasco de Quiroga, bishop of
Michoacán in the 1540s, who wrote of his inspiration “in
the new primitive and reborn Church of this New World,
a reflection and an outline of the Primitive Church in our
known world in the Age of the Apostles.” 31 In fact, from
the first years of their entry into the New World, the Fran-
ciscans were careful to cultivate the connection between
themselves and the twelve apostles, widely publicizing
their arrival as a group of twelve in 1524 in image and text,
obscuring the earlier arrival (in 1523) of a group of three.
Those familiar with the tropes of the sixteenth-century
Renaissance will recognize in Valadés’s depiction of the
“first Roman church” as a vaguely classical building the
larger Renaissance interest in the present age as renovating
the classical past, but within this lies a particularly Francis-
can apostolic project for the New World, which intended
to capture the purity and energy of the “primitive” church.
But such a return to the past, primitive church entailed a
blurring of the particular temporal moment captured in
the engraving. This linkage of past and present is carried
further in Valadés’s label for the maquette, “primi santae
romane aeclesie,” an ambiguous phrase that may suggest
that the building being carried into New Spain represents
the early Christian church established in Rome or that it
represents the Roman Catholic Church of Valadés’s own
day, headed by the pope.
The workings of memory allow it to be both at once,
a primitive church of Rome in a present-day moment of
global Catholicism. As a starting point, the maquette,
since it is not a real building, opens up the semiotic field:
it resembles the architecture of Rome; it also captures
the kind of structures that Valadés’s own treatise recom-
mended constructing in the mind to remember sacred