Barbara_E._Mundy]_The_Death_of_Aztec_Tenochtitlan

4 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy

an ambitious three-part history of the Mexica rulers and
the empire they had built over two centuries. These art-
ists worked in tandem with Spanish-language scribes to
translate the visual information into alphabetic form; thus
their images are accompanied by explanatory texts writ-
ten in Spanish. From its inception, the Codex Mendoza
was a work of translation, mediating between two writing
systems (indigenous pictography/Spanish alphabet) and
two concepts of the book.

Folio 2r is one of the two pages of the book that are

dominated by a single image, and so are visually distinctive

within the larger volume (figure 1.3). Its Mexica creators,

who could draw on a long tradition of indigenous book-

making wherein one could find important full-page state-

ments like this one, were likely to have also been influenced

by the illustrated frontispieces of printed European books

that had been imported into the country. These too offered

visual introductions to the content that followed. Thus the

figuRe 1.3. Unknown creator, the

foundation of Tenochtitlan, Codex

Mendoza, fol. 2r, ca. 1542. Bodleian

Libraries, University of Oxford, Ms.

Arch. Selden A1.