Shannah Rose

Samuel H. Kress Foundation/Marian and Andrew Heiskell Rome Prize
2 settembre 2024–3 luglio 2025
Professione
PhD Candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Titolo del progetto
The Codex Ríos and the Reception of Mesoamerican Pictography in Early Modern Italy
Descrizione del progetto

My dissertation examines the creation and translation of illustrated manuscripts in early colonial central Mexico and their reception and reproduction in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The project’s fulcrum is the Codex Ríos (Codex Vaticanus A, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana), a pictorial encyclopedia of Nahua culture that was reproduced after a now-lost precontact “original” in the decades after the European invasion and sent to Rome. The Codex Ríos is the only surviving Mesoamerican manuscript to feature a comprehensive textual account of Nahua culture, history, and religion in Italian, and my dissertation is the first art-historical study to consider the production of a colonial Mexican manuscript by Indigenous painter-scribes (tlacuiloque) in the Valley of Mexico and its reproduction for a specifically Italian audience. Through codicological examinations, comparative visual analysis of Indigenous pictographies, paleographic studies of Italian, Spanish, and Nahuatl scripts, and technical analysis of paper and pigments, my research explores how illustrated, translated, and copied books acted as linguistic and cultural mediators between colonial Latin America and early modern Italy.