huaniTzin RecenTeRs The ciTy • 105Huanitzin is significant and offers us some notion not only
of how he represented his domain, but also of the larger
spatial horizon against which he set it. The framing text is
written in Latin capitals, a text that commands the viewer’s
attention. Its use of overlapping letters is typical of engraved
inscriptions on architecture, texts set prominently into the
façades of buildings that commonly state patronage and
date of construction. This “architectural text” along the
edge of the featherwork describes the city over which Hua-
nitzin ruled as “magna indiaru[m] urbe Mexico” (the great
city of the Indies, Mexico). The use of the name “Mexico”
is significant. At the time the work was made, Huanitzin
held sway over only a part of the island city, the indigenous
lands set around the Spanish-dominated nucleus, and this
ring city was often referred to as “la gran ciudad de Tenoch-
titlan Mexico” or “la gran ciudad de Mexico Tenochtitlan”
in other texts of the 1530s. 20 In contrast, “Mexico” could
mean the entire island, encompassing both indigenous and
Spanish political jurisdictions alike, as we will see more
fully in chapter 7. It is this more expansive name that the
featherwork employs, a “great city” that takes its name from
the ethnic “Mexica” moniker. Significantly, the text does not
use the term “ Tenochtitlan,” the name of the pre-Hispanic
city. Moreover, the text also situates the city not in “New
Spain,” a name that implied its derivative European nature
as well as its political identity as the seat of the viceroy of
New Spain. Instead, the city of Mexico here is set against
the horizon of the entire field of Spanish territories in the
New World and beyond, as “the Indies” would be used also
to describe Spain’s foothold in Asia after midcentury.
The linkage of the text “magna indiaru[m] urbe Me xico”
to Huanitzin as governor can be seen as a push-back against
the aspirations of the Spanish cabildo to control the entire
island, including the spaces of Mexico-Tenochtitlan; it also
avoids situating that city within viceregal “New Spain,” a po-
litical space under the control of the Spanish royal govern-
ment, headed by the viceroy and the Real Audiencia. 21 The
ambition to create a “magna indiaru[m] urbe Mexico” would
be shared by the other figure named along the left side of
the frame, the Franciscan Pedro de Gante, in residence in
the San Francisco monastery from the time of its founding
in 1525, who would be keenly aware of European ideologies
of the “urbe.” While the Franciscan projects for the city ran
parallel to, and often intersected with, those of Huanitzin
and other native gobernadores, they will be treated separately
in the chapter that follows. If this work can offer something
of how Huanitzin and Gante thought of the city in terms
of a magna indiaru[m] urbe Mexico, we have yet to discover
the full extent of their vision, as captured in the featherwork
as a representation of the urban space. Taking into account
the spatial valences of featherworks, and reconsidering the
status of this one as a gift from the perspective of Mexico-
Tenochtitlan, this featherwork will reveal itself as a multi-
faceted representation of the city.The feaTheRed icon and The gifT
To the Mexica viewer and maker, import lay in the feather
medium; in the pre-Hispanic period, feathers signified the
spatial expanse of the tribute empire. And like other such
feather paintings created in the colonial period, this one
was created through the laborious application of thou-
sands of feathers, often the brilliant plumage of birds that
had been imported from the tropics, onto a paper substrate
to create bold fields of color, or, as in this case, images. An
indication of its importance is signaled by the Florentine
Codex, which devotes long passages of its Nahuatl text
to the art, as well as pages of illustrations, revealing the
intricacies of an art form achieved only through extensive
training. 22 Colonial observers could be unstinting in their
praise of Mexica artists, and certainly were so for feather-
workers, in particular for their ability to copy work with
unerring precision. 23 Feather workshops were a common
sight in the city at least through the 1570s; the writers of
the Florentine Codex, created around 1570, declare that
“whoever would like to see [the particularities of the craft]
and understand them, will be able to see them with their
own eyes in the houses of the craftsmen, which are in all
areas of this New Spain, doing their craft.” 24
Other writers have analyzed the relationship of feath-
ers to the sacrificial imagery depicted here and the solar
qualities of the plumage; our interest, however, is in the
spatial connotations of the featherwork. 25 It is likely that
this featherwork The Mass of Saint Gregory came not just
from the city named in its frame but from the very part
of the indigenous city that was emerging as a new center
in the 1530s, oriented around the monastery of San Fran-
cisco and the great Tianguis of Mexico (see figure 4.2).
The presence of this craft specialty in this area of the city is
signaled by a comment made by the Franciscan chronicler
Torquemada, who mentions that San Francisco was built
on “Moteuczoma’s aviary,” which may have been part of the
garden complex that appears in the southwest of the city in
the 1524 map that accompanied Cortés’s Second Letter (see