40 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
appearing as the slightly darker brown ground at center,
and it was rendered by a native artist, perhaps as early as
1537 (figure 2.8). 51 The map is an enormous work, measur-
ing thirty-one by forty-five inches, painted on skin. While
we know very little about why exactly the map was made
or how it arrived at the University of Uppsala, where it is
found today, the skin support points to its being an elite
commission, perhaps created by native painters work-
ing out of the Franciscan monastery in Tlatelolco, since
this monastery dominates the urban fabric in the image,
depicted in a much larger scale than other buildings of the
city in the city’s upper right. 52 But even more salient is the
attention it pays to the water systems of the valley, both
the streams and the rivers that supplied the lakes, which
appear as fine capillaries on the large map, as well as the
systems of dikes that protected the island city. While the
date of the map will be discussed further in chapter 5, in
rendering the dike system, the artists show them as they
functioned right before the Conquest, that is, fully opera-
tive, and in this, present a utopian view of the city.
As seen in figure 2.9, a detail from the map’s lower hori-
zontal quadrant, the dry land of the city is colored brown
at top, and ringing the city’s perimeter, the dike of Ahuit-
zotl appears as a wall of light yellow-brown stonework.
Somewhat farther to the east (toward the upper part of the
image) is the dike of Nezahualcoyotl, appearing in much
the same fashion, as an undulating band of yellow-brown;
it is wide enough for some of the figures to walk upon it.
The artist has used careful gradations of pigment to show
the quality of the water depicted: while the salty water in
Lake Tetzcoco, which dominates the bottom of figure 2.9,
is painted a darker blue with an admixture of green, the
area above it, between the dikes, is a much more pure blue,
showing how the dikes effectively separated the salty water
from the sweet. The slight difference in pigments used by
the artist is highly important. In recent scientific studies of
another indigenous map from Mexico City, the Beinecke
Map of ca. 1565, as well as the Florentine Codex, Diana
Magaloni Kerpel has argued that indigenous artists used
different pigments not for visual effect alone, but to cap-
ture differences among the objects they were representing;figuRe 2.8. Unknown creator, Map of Santa Cruz, ca. 1537–1555.
Uppsala University Library, Sweden.