foRgeTTing TenochTiTLan • 123texts—the temples of the Gospel described above, with
their columns of porphyry and jasper. In the midst of a
larger image that shows indigenous minds being engraved
with new Christian knowledge, the central temple, with
its ambiguous inscription, seems to be Valadés’s attempt
at creating a mental image allowing readers, particularly
the preachers to whom it was addressed, to remember the
primitive church of Rome in their contemporary work.
Recall, though, that the Franciscan project of remak-
ing the city was both an internal and an external one,
and the external process of “remembering” Rome may
have been first carried out by Gante, Valadés’s mentor,
whose image appears in the upper left. While there is
only fragmentary evidence of Gante’s actions in the city of
Mexico-Tenochtitlan after the Conquest, much of it sug-
gests that Gante’s great project for Mexico-Tenochtitlan
was to create another Rome within this inovo indiarum
orbe. Just as idolatry was supposedly being erased from the
minds of the figures clustered at his feet in this courtyard,
and Christian catechism or useful trades engraved, so too,
with the destruction of the native temples, Rome was being
inscribed onto the conquered city. In his early letter to his
fellow Flemish friars, written in Spanish after forgetting
his native tongue, Gante wrote, “I, due to the pity of God,
and for His honor and glory, in this province of Mexico
where I live, which is another Rome, with my industry and
divine favor have constructed more than a hundred houses
consecrated to the Lord, both churches and chapels” (ital-
ics mine). 32 While comparisons to ancient Rome were
frequently employed in century-long debates around the
justice of the Spanish Conquest in the New World, as
David Lupher has discussed, it was not the Rome of the
pagans that Franciscans were envisioning; rather it was
Rome as a pagan space remade into a Christian one to
which they aspired. 33
buiLding a new Rome
If the malleability of the mind made Tenochtitlan-as-Rome
possible as an idea, how were the Franciscans to achieve it
on the ground, in the lived spaces of Mexico-Tenochtitlan?
When Cortés reassigned the lands within the Mexica cer-
emonial precinct, his tremendous will (and ego) allowed
him to act as if no sacred city had existed there before; tak-
ing possession of the Mexica palaces was certainly a practi-
cal move but also indicates a belief that present possession
erases past history. The Franciscans, and Gante, following
Pope Gregory the Great, understood that the city they cre-
ated needed to be both familiar (so converts would “flock”
to familiar places) and transformed (“transformed from
the cult of demons”). 34 One of Gante’s better-documented
building projects, the chapel of San José de los Naturales,
offers some indication of how these double (and on the
surface, contradictory) goals could be achieved in a single
building. The chapel was an enormous, seven-naved struc-
ture built at the east end of the complex, probably between
1547 and 1552. Six massive wooden columns dominated its
great façade, defined its seven naves, and upheld its roof
(figure 6.4). Such great interior spaces were unknown in
pre-Hispanic architecture, which focused on mass rather
than volume; the use of the barrel vault to span the great
spaces was also unknown. But this transformed space was
filled with the familiar. The columns supporting the roof
were almost certainly made with ahuehuetl trees, the great
native cedars that could provide the strong and straight sup-
ports the building called for and that, as we saw in chapter 3,
grew in watery places like Chapultepec and were associatedfiguRe 6.4. San José de los Naturales, reconstruction drawing of
façade, from George Kubler, Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth
Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), figure 252, p. 330.
Reproduced courtesy of the Kubler family.