A View onto the World: Tenochtitlan, Travel and
A View onto the World: Tenochtitlan, Travel and Utopia in the Early Modern Period
Krystel Chéhab
Department of Art History and Communication Studies
McGill University, Montreal
August 2007
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of the
Master of Arts
© Krystel Chéhab 2007
Table of Contents
Chapter One - The Cortés Map of 1524: The Archetypal Image of Tenochtitlan ......... 18
Urban Forms: A Fish-eye Perspective of Tenochtitlan ............................................. 29
Chapter Two - Insular Topographies: Tenochtitlan, Venice, and the Mirroring
The Isolarii as Genre: Cristoforo Buondelmonti and Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti ........ 48
Receding Horizons: Benedetto Bordone’s Libro and the Islands in the Atlantic ...... 51
A Play of Resemblances between Tenochtitlan and Venice ...................................... 54
Perspectival Shifts: Re-imagining the Bacino of San Marco .................................... 87
2
List of Figures
I.
Figure 1: La gran ciudad de Temixtitan (Tenochtitlan, 1524). Praeclara
Fernanandi di Nova Maris Oceani Hispania Narratio (Nuremberg, 1524).
II.
Figure 2: Jacopo de’Barbari, Venetie. Printed by Anton Kolb (Venice,
1500).
III.
Figure 3: Venetia, Benedetto Bordone, Libro di Benedetto Bordone
(Venice, 1528).
IV.
Figure 4: La gran città di Temixtitan, Benedetto Bordone, Libro di
Benedetto Bordone (Venice, 1528).
V.
Figure 5: Temistitan, Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Terzo Volume delle
Navigationi e Viaggi (Venice, 1528).
VI.
Figure 6: Nova Mexico, Arnoldus Montanus, De Nieuwe en Onbekende
Weeereld (Amsterdam, 1671).
VII.
Figure 7: Konrad Morant, View of Strasbourg , 1548. Germanisches
Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.
VIII.
Figure 8: Detail, La gran ciudad de Temixtitan (Tenochtitlan, 1524) .
Praeclara Fernanandi di Nova Maris Oceani Hispania Narratio
(Nuremberg, 1524).
IX.
Figure 9: Pourtrait et Description de la grand cite de Temistitan, ou,
Tenuctutlan, ou selon aucuns Messico, ou, Mexico, ville capitale de la
Nueva Espaigne, Antoine Du Pinet, Plantz, Pourtraitz et Descriptions de plusieurs villes et forteresses, tant de l’Europe, Asie, & Afrique, que des
Indes et terres neuves (Lyon, 1564).
X.
Figure 10: Mexico, Georg Braun, Civitates orbis terrarum (Cologne,
1572).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my advisor, Bronwen Wilson, for her enthusiasm and encouragement, and for the continued generosity of her knowledge and time. Her intellectual insight has probed me to think about this project and art history as a discipline in new ways. The Department of Art History and Communication
Studies and the Making Publics project have provided important forums for the exchange of ideas. I am grateful to my colleagues, and friends, for making graduate school at McGill a challenging and positive experience, with a special thanks to Anu, Ariana, and Gab. Thanks to Sonia for helping me with the translation. A warm thanks to my family, in Miami and in Montreal, and especially to Linda, Emile and Carine, for their optimism, love, and encouragement. I am thankful for the generosity of Leila and Alex who opened their doors to me. To Gorka for his unfailing support throughout.
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Abstract
This thesis examines the Cortés map of Tenochtitlan (1524) and its derivatives to explore the ways the map emerges in diverse forms, and in different contexts, throughout the sixteenth century. For nearly two hundred years, the only images of Tenochtitlan, or Mexico City, to be published in Europe were derived from the original Cortés map, which represented the city before its conquest by the Spanish in 1521. The maps of Tenochtitlan included in Benedetto Bordone’s Libro di
Benedetto Bordone nel quale si ragiona tutte l’Isole del mondo (1528) and
Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Navigationi e Viaggi (1556) brought the city into dialogue with Venice, encouraging viewers to interpret the two together. As
Venice shifted from its traditional maritime economy to land ventures on the mainland in the sixteenth century, its citizens looked to the island city of
Tenochtitlan to rethink their city’s own lagoonal environment. Tenochtitlan’s insular topography invited new possibilities for re-imagining Venice in utopic terms. However, with the fall of Tenochtitlan, the printed imagery in Europe evoked a city that was rapidly being transformed into another, Mexico City, under
Spanish rule. It was the visual experience of Tenochtitlan in images, rather than the real city they claimed to represent, that would prompt a re-envisioning of
Venice.
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Résumé
Ce mémoire propose un examen de la carte géographique de Tenochtitlan
élaborée par Cortés en 1524 et de ses dérivés afin d’évaluer comment cette carte s’est révélée sous diverses formes, et dans différents contextes au cours du seizième siècle. Pendant plus de deux cents ans, les seules images de
Tenochtitlan, ou Mexico, à être publiées en Europe dérivent de la carte de 1524 qui représente la ville avant la conquête espagnole de 1520. Les cartes de
Tenochtitlan incluses dans le Libro di Benedetto Bordone nel quale si ragiona tutte l’Isole del mondo de Benedetto Bordone (1528) et Navigationi e Viaggi de
Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1556) mettent la capitale aztèque en dialogue avec
Venise, encourageant ainsi les lecteurs à interpréter les deux parallèlement.
Lorsque, au seizième siècle, l’économie vénitienne, traditionnellement maritime, se tourne vers le commerce continental, les Vénitiens se tournent à leur tour vers la ville insulaire de Tenochtitlan pour repenser l’environnement lagunaire de leur ville. La topographie insulaire de Tenochtitlan offre de nouvelles manières d’envisager Venise en des termes utopiques. Toutefois, après la chute de
Tenochtitlan, l’imagerie imprimée circulant en Europe évoque d’ors et déjà une ville en devenir, Mexico, une ville sous le joug espagnol. Les images de
Tenochtitlan, plutôt que la vraie ville qu’elles clament représenter, procurent une expérience visuelle qui entraîne une nouvelle visualisation de Venise.
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Introduction
Upon his arrival in Mexico in 1519, Bernal Diaz de Castillo, a companion of the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, was struck by the arresting view of
Tenochtitlan, or present-day Mexico City, as it revealed itself at the centre of
Lake Texcoco. From his vantage point on the outer shores, the city’s unfamiliar temples and towers created a visual spectacle that compelled Diaz to write,
“…one has to marvel at it all so much that I do not know how to describe it, seeing things never heard of, seen or even dreamed of...”
At a moment when voyages of discovery were rapidly changing the contours of the earth, as
Europeans conceived them, sixteenth-century travelers were charged with describing unknown worlds, such as Tenochtitlan, for their audiences back home.
As far-flung places began to emerge on the horizon, they were often accessible to
Europeans only through representation, in both textual and graphic forms. While
Diaz represented Tenochtitlan in text, an extraordinary map-view – the Cortés map of 1524 - presented Europeans with a visual image of Tenochtitlan (fig. 1).
The Cortés map offered viewers an image of the island city circumscribed within the contours of a blue circular lake. In 1520, shortly after Hernán Cortés entered the capital city of Tenochtitlan, he dispatched his Second Letter to the
Emperor Charles V. Enclosed with the letter is believed to have been a prototype, now lost, that provided the European artist of the Cortés map with a model of
1 I am drawing here on the English translation in David A. Boruchoff, “Beyond Utopia and
Paradise: Cortés, Bernal Diaz, and the Rhetoric of Consecration,” MLN 106, no. 2 (1991): 331.
See also Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, ed.
Miguel León-Portilla (Madrid: Historia 16, 1984), A, 310-311.
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Tenochtitlan.
First printed in Nuremberg in 1524, the Cortés map would soon become the archetype for a number of derivative images of the remote city.
Indeed, throughout the century, Europeans eager to gain visual access to
Tenochtitlan would only encounter the Cortés map in its diverse replications.
Derived from a single source, images of Tenochtitlan, as they emerged in island books and travel narratives, elicited new ways of thinking about the relationship between cities and their surroundings.
Venice and Historiography
Intriguingly, Tenochtitlan came to be compared to, and hold particular resonance for, Venice, another city with a striking insular topography. In his isolario, or book of islands, published in 1528, Benedetto Bordone is attentive to the topographical similarities between Tenochtitlan, a city among new worlds, and his adopted city of Venice.
Although the two were removed geographically from each another across the ‘Ocean Sea,’
as the Atlantic was conceived, that
Tenochtitlan was built on water, at the centre of a lake, solicited its interpretation as a city “like Venice.”
This pairing of Tenochtitlan with Venice, and the implications it comes to have for sixteenth-century Venetians, forms the basis of my study.
2 For a discussion of the prototype, see Barbara E. Mundy, “Mapping the Aztec Capital: The 1524
3
Nuremberg Map of Tenochtitlan, Its Sources and Meanings,” Imago Mundi, 50 (1998): 11-33.
Bordone is originally from Padua. For his biography and career as a miniaturist, see Lilian
Armstrong, “Benedetto Bordone, ‘Miniator’, and Cartography in Early Sixteenth-Century
4
Venice,” Imago Mundi 48 (1996): 65-92.
This was according to the tricontinental understanding of the globe inherited from the ancients.
See Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western
Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; Santa Fe, N.M.: The Center for
5
American Places, 2001).
Benedetto Bordone, Il Libro di Benedetto Bordone, Venice, Nicolò Zoppini, 1528, fol. VIIv. For the English translation, see Armstrong, “Benedetto Bordone, ‘Miniator,’” 90n98.
8
Bordone is not alone is associating the cities together; a collection of visual and textual references link the two insular topographies in the early modern period.
Floating in the centre of the lagoon as a series of interconnecting islands,
Venice stands at the crossroads between Europe and Asia. As the gateway to the
Levant, the mercantile city of Venice had long enjoyed strong ties to Byzantium, and an established history of trade relations with the East.
Unlike other cities on the Italian peninsula with visible remnants of a Roman past, Venice was pressed to solidify its history of origins, a feat that became increasingly important in the sixteenth century. This myth of origins, a topic that has been addressed by scholars such as Edward Muir, among others, claimed that Roman elites on the mainland, who sought refuge in the lagoon from religious persecution, established the city of Venice.
This celebrated past was compounded by the claim that
Venice was founded at the church of San Giacomo in Rialto, at the centre of
Venice, on March 25, 421, on the Feast of the Annunciation. In this respect, the city could claim historical origins from both republican Rome and early
Christianity.
These legendary beginnings, as Patricia Fortini Brown conceives it, along with the translation of Saint Mark’s body to Venice in 828 and the Peace of
6 For examples, see David Y. Kim, “Uneasy Reflections: Images of Venice and Tenochtitlan in
Benedetto Bordone’s Isolario,” Res 49-50 (2006): 81-82.
See Deborah Howard, Venice & the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian
Architecture, 1100-1500 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); and Brian Pullan, ed., Crisis and Change in the Venetian Economy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London:
8
Methuen, 1968).
For the historiography of the myth of Venice, see Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance
9
Venice (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981).
Patricia Fortini Brown, Art and Life in Renaissance Venice (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1997), 16-17.
9
Venice in 1177, can be understood as three “iconic narratives” that forged the myth of Venice.
As scholars have effectively argued, maps of Venice were complicit in rehearsing the myth of origins. Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan examines the histories of the islands of the lagoon, such as Torcello, to suggest the ways they are forgotten in order to place the Republic’s mythic beginnings in Rialto, at the centre of
Venice (1994).
For Crouzet-Pavan, the process of overlooking these histories becomes apparent in maps such as Jacopo de’Barbari’s View of Venice (1500) and
Benedetto Bordone’s Venice (1528), which privilege the centre while marginalizing the islands of the lagoon (figs. 2 and 3). Juergen Schulz, in his earlier study of Jacopo’s View of Venice, is interested in the ways the map came to emphasize certain facets of the city, specifically those that symbolized its republican institutions, to promote an idea of Venice as commonwealth (1978).
Venice’s ideal constitution, which comprised elements of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy, was to ensure a balanced government where individual powers would be mitigated. For Venetians, the city’s republican institutions, in addition to its isolated geographic location, secured its liberty from outside aggression, sustaining the longevity of the Republic.
10 Patricia Fortini Brown, “The Self-Definition of the Venetian Republic,” in City States in
Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy eds. Anthony Molho, Kurt Raaflaub, Julia Emlen (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 512.
11 Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, “Venice and Torcello: History and Oblivion,” Renaissance Studies 8, no. 4 (1994): 416-427.
12 Juergen Schulz, “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making, City Views, and
Moralized Geography before the Year 1500,” The Art Bulletin 60, no. 3 (1978): 468.
13 Gaetano Cozzi, Ambiente Veneziano, Ambiente Veneto. Saggi su politica, società, cultura nella
Repubblica di Venezia in età moderna (Venice: Marsilio, 2002).
10
In the early years of the sixteenth century, external events propelled
Venice to re-evaluate its relationship to its seafaring past.
In 1453,
Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks who came to dominate trade relations in the Aegean Sea. The Portuguese discovery of trade routes to the East posed a serious threat to Venice’s already weakening economy. In 1509, the League of
Cambrai, an agglomeration of European powers weary of Venetian expansionism, joined forces to overtake its territories on the terrafirma, though these lands were eventually regained by Venice. As the century progressed, Venetians began to reorient themselves away from the Eastern Mediterranean towards their territories on the mainland, shifting their focus from the historical stato del mar to an agricultural-based economy on the terrafirma.
Denis Cosgrove, in his discussion of Venetian interests in the terrafirma, examines the imperative role played by maps in these ventures, and the ways maps were implicated in the routinely affairs of the Republic.
He is also attentive to how maps become linked with other modes of representation in Venice, specifically in relation to representations of landscapes (1992, 1984).
While Venice did not participate directly in the explorations of new worlds, the steady flow of travel accounts into the city, due to its reputation as a foremost centre of print, created a forum for geographical knowledge, especially
14 Denis Cosgrove, “Venice, the Veneto and Sixteenth-century Landscape,” in Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1984), 108.
15
16
Ibid.
Denis Cosgrove, “Mapping New Worlds: Culture and Cartography in Sixteenth-Century
Venice,” Imago Mundi, 44 (1992): 71-72.
17 See Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape.
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among Venetian humanists like Giovanni Battista Ramusio.
The new visibility afforded by the printing press diffused knowledge of recently encountered lands across broader audiences. The multiple island books, travel narratives, and atlases published in Venice during the sixteenth century kept citizens abreast of discoveries of unknown worlds. Likewise, printmakers in Venice produced images of their native city, often in commemoration of important civic events, and sold them in large numbers to visitors.
As Bronwen Wilson suggests in her study of printed maps, the numerous print shops stationed in Venice, with images on display in their windows, would have familiarized Venetians with the shape of their city.
Wilson is interested in the ways the visual experience of print overlapped with Venetians’ experiences of the city, and the ways identity becomes constituted in this process (2005). The innovations of print also publicized travellers’ accounts in the Mediterranean, a geographic location that would have undoubtedly resonated with Venetians. Deborah Howard’s studies of
Venetians in Damascus in the fifteenth century (2003) and Patricia Fortini
Brown’s book on the seafaring adventures of Cristoforo Buondelmonti and
Cyriacus of Ancona, among others, (1996) are two examples of art historical works that engage with Venice’s relations with the East.
18 R.A. Skelton, introduction to Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Navigationi e Viaggi, 1563-1606
(Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1967-1970), v.
19 David Woodward, Maps as Prints in the Italian Renaissance: Makers, Distributors &
Consumers (London: British Library, 1996), 83.
20 Bronwen Wilson, “From Myth to Metropole: Sixteenth-Century Printed Maps of Venice,” in
The World in Venice: Print, The City, and Early Modern Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2005), 60.
21 See Deborah Howard, “Death in Damascus: Venetians in Syria in the mid-Fifteenth Century,”
Muqarnas 20 (2003): 143-57; Francesco Bianchi and Deborah Howard, “Life and Death in
Damascus: The Material Culture of Venetians in the Syrian Capital in the mid-Fifteenth Century,”
Studi Veneziani 46 (2003): 233-300; Deborah Howard, “The Status of the Oriental Traveller in
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While these ties with the East are deeply sewn along historical lines, and have important implications in the formation of identity in sixteenth-century
Venice, my project, instead, is interested in the ways new worlds in the Atlantic, specifically the island city of Tenochtitlan, come to play a role in Venice at a moment when the city is turning away from its traditional stato del mar towards land ventures on the terrafirma. I examine how Tenochtitlan is mobilized within representation, in different formats and outlets, to petition Europeans, in general, and Venetians, in particular, to view the two cities together. While I first address the Cortés map, the two chapters that follow consider the ways the derivative images of Tenochtitlan bring the city into dialogue with Venice, prompting
Venetians to re-envisage their own insular topography.
In recent years, scholars have interrogated the objectivity of maps, recognizing them as graphic representations whose meanings are often manipulated. Maps of the Spanish Americas, which were produced in Europe, had important repercussions for the peoples and places they claimed to represent. As
J.B. Harley has effectively argued, sixteenth-century maps had the potential to
‘silence’ the realities of the Americas for European viewers (1988).
Walter
Mignolo is attentive to the ways that maps are complicit in colonizing processes.
Developments in European cartography, prompted, in part, by the rediscovery of
Ptolemy’s Geographia , formulated a distinction between the Ptolemaic grid,
Renaissance Venice,” in Re-Orienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East, ed.
Gerald MacLean (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 29-49; and Patricia
Fortini Brown, Venice & Antiquity: the Venetian Sense of the Past (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1996).
22 See J.B Harley, “Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern
Europe,” Imago Mundi 40 (1988): 57-76; and J.B. Harley, “Rereading the Maps of the Columbus
Encounter,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82, no. 3: 543-65.
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employed by Europeans, and indigenous representations of space. Mignolo suggests that Europeans maps were naturalized as truthful representations while indigenous spatial codes were effectively repressed (1995).
The Cortés map of
Tenochtitlan has also been studied in this light. José Rabasa (1993) and Barbara
E. Mundy (1998) have identified different ways the map participated in colonizing processes that subjugated the Aztec ruler Moctezcuma to European rule.
The Chapters
Alternatively, my study is concerned with how the single image of
Tenochtitlan, first represented in the Cortés map of 1524, migrates between different contexts, and manifests in diverse forms, to conjure an idea of
Tenochtitlan in the geographical imagination of Europeans. The first chapter examines the ways the Cortés map functions on two levels. In the age of explorations, when new worlds were often associated with amorphous terrains, the Cortés map vigorously attempts to carve out a place in this ambiguity. As
Rabasa aptly notes, “…the plan of the city [of Tenochtitlan] infuses newness into what otherwise would be solely the contours of a coastline without a semantic difference.”
As a representation of a city that few viewers would have the opportunity to experience, the visual imagery was charged with evoking a vivid sense of place. While the map calls attention to the specificity of Tenochtitlan, it also serves as the archetype for future images of the city. Remarkably, for almost
23 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and
Colonization (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995), 243.
24 José Rabasa, Inventing America: Spanish historiography and the formation of Eurocentrism
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993); and Mundy, “Mapping the Aztec Capital.”
25 Rabasa, Inventing America, 100.
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two hundred years, the Cortés map bracketed an idea of a place, in the minds of
Europeans, far-removed from the real city it claimed to represent.
Venetian travel writers, as Deborah Howard explains, often described unknown places by comparing them to sites within Venice.
Introducing the unfamiliar into the framework of the familiar was a means of gaining knowledge in the early modern period that, as scholars have argued, becomes prevalent in explorations of the Americas, since travelers were confronted with things never before seen.
In sixteenth-century maps of Tenochtitlan, European artists were undoubtedly drawing on their knowledge of other island cities, such as Venice, and ideal city plans, which were largely popular in Europe. For Benedetto
Bordone, Venice’s insular topography becomes a basis of comparison for
Tenochtitlan. In Bordone’s Libro , whose island book format tended to emphasize outer contours, the play of resemblances between the two cities is magnified. If the wealth of print shops in Venice allowed citizens to identify the outlines of their city, as Wilson suggests, then presenting them with a distant city in the new world that mirrored their own raised important questions. In chapter two, I examine how the mirroring effect between Tenochtitlan and Venice in Bordone’s
Libro brings forward the otherness of Tenochtitlan. This otherness, underwritten by the elusive origins of the new world, crystallizes around acute temporal and religious issues that plagued sixteenth-century Europeans.
26 Howard, “The Status of the Oriental Traveller,” 32.
27 See Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Introduction,” in America in European Consciousness, ed.
Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 1.
15
If Tenochtitlan was originally represented in the guise of a European ideal city, one that mimicked Venice’s own insular topography, in Bordone’s Libro ,
Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s map of Tenochtitlan (1556) signals a considerable shift in perspective. By mid-century, as Venice moved towards an agriculturalbased economy on the terrafirma, it was obliged to redefine its precarious relationship to its lagoonal surroundings. In chapter three, I examine how the map of Tenochtitlan included in Ramusio’s travel collection, Navigationi e Viaggi, brings forward concerns in Venice over the future of the lagoon. I look to the famous debates between Alvise Cornaro and Cristoforo Sabbadino with an interest in how Tenochtitlan becomes a model for solutions to water management.
While Tenochtitlan had previously been conceived in relation to its resemblance to Venice, it was now Venice, in these unrealized projects for the lagoon, that came to re-imagine itself as its new world counterpart.
Intriguingly, however, the images that fuelled comparisons between
Venice and Tenochtitlan - and eventually compelled Venetians to re-envision their city in new ways – represented a place that no longer existed. Indeed, while images produced in Europe throughout the sixteenth century visualized the city of
Tenochtitlan, it had long commenced its transformation into Mexico City, a place that no longer had a purpose for the canals that Venetians scrutinized so intently.
While Mexico City emerged across the Atlantic, the Cortés map actively participated in shaping perceptions in Europe. For close to two centuries,
28 Beginning in the 1550s, the canals were filled to support the expanding colonial city under
Spanish rule. See Richard L. Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic world, 1493-1793 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 90.
16
the single image of Tenochtitlan and its multiple derivatives, including those of
Bordone and Ramusio, were the only images to be published.
It is from this archetypal image - the Cortés map of 1524 - that my study begins.
29 Ibid., 89.
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Chapter One - The Cortés Map of 1524: The Archetypal Image of
Tenochtitlan
In 1522, the preface to the first edition of Hernán Cortés’ Second Letter urged Europeans to envision one among many cities in the Aztec world. Published in Seville, by Jacobo Cromberger, the preface reads, “Among these cities there is one more marvellous and more wealthy than all the others, called Temixtitan
[Tenochtitlan]...”
Two years later, in 1524, Cortés’ letter was translated into Latin by Pietro Savorgnani de Foli and published in Nuremberg.
Readers of the Latin edition were now presented with an extraordinary map-view of Tenochtitlan that revealed an island city floating within the contours of a blue circular lake (fig. 1).
The Latin edition introduced Cortés’ quests to broader European audiences, and, like its earlier counterpart, encouraged a particular interest in Tenochtitlan. Indeed, instead of relying solely on textual allusions to “the great city of Temixtitan” that punctuated Cortés’ Second Letter, Europeans were also engaged by the visual experience of the map. This map, the Cortés map of 1524, would forge a lasting idea of Tenochtitlan, in Europe, through its replications in print.
First Appearances: The Revelatory Effect
The strategic placement of the Cortés map heightened its revelatory effect.
1 Hernan Cortés, Letters from Mexico, trans. and ed. A.R. Pagden. (New York: Grossman, 1971),
47. Citations are from this edition. For a discussion of the name of Tenochtitlan, see George
Kubler, “The name ‘Tenochtitlan,’” Tlalocan I (1944): 376-377.
2 A.R. Pagden, ‘Translator’s Introduction,’ in Hernan Cortés, Letters from Mexico, 1x . Federic
Peyrus printed this edition of the Second Letter and Cortés map of Tenochtitlan (1524). For different editions of the map, see Mundy, “Mapping the Aztec Capital,” 32.
In the opening pages of the Latin edition of the Second Letter, a pleated folio, which hid the map, divulged its contents when unfolded.
The map’s oversize dimensions required its compression and the reader to open it, making the revelatory process a haptic one. As one of the first urban images to emerge from the Atlantic world, the process of unveiling the map actively petitioned Europeans to inspect the unknown city and scrutinize it closely. For these individuals, the image granted visual access to a city beyond their own; it encouraged them to envision a place that was absent in time and space.
Roger Chartier, in his study of print culture, is attentive to the ways a book’s formal elements establish a protocol that organizes how the book is read.
As Chartier suggests, “The book always aims at installing an order.”
Positioned in the book’s opening pages, the Cortés map formed part of a mnemonic system that constructed an idea of Tenochtitlan that preceded readers’ encounters with the text.
Through the order of the book, the map impresses an image of a place, one that becomes slowly populated with peoples and events as readers progress through the Second Letter.
Set in the centre of Lake Texcoco, the map reveals a striking squareshaped temple precinct hemmed into its cityscape by interlocking islands and
3 Praeclara Ferdinãdi. Cortesii de Nova maris Oceani Hyspania Narratio…(Nuremberg, 1524) The map is located between page ii and iii. For the placement of the Cortés map in other editions, see
4
Mundy, “Mapping the Aztec Capital,” 32.
Kagan, Urban Images , 73. Scholars recognize the earlier View of Hispaniola woodcut that was paired with Columbus’ De insulis in mari Indico nuper inventis (1494) as the first city map of the
Atlantic world. However, while this image reveals the contours of the Spanish settlement of La
Isabella, it was based on the textual accounts of Columbus’ letter and thus conceived exclusively in the imagination of the artist.
5 Roger Chartier, ed. The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe,
6 trans. Lydia Cochrane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 5.
Roger Chartier, Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and libraries in Europe between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), viii.
7 Chartier, The Culture of Print , 5.
19
narrow waterways. From this central precinct, past the robust walls that enclose the sacred space, clusters of adjoining red-roofed houses populate the surrounding islands. Arranged in a circular formation, with the temple precinct at its core, the islands present the city as a unified whole. The islands, along with the figures that circumnavigate the lake in canoes, propel viewers to trace Tenochtitlan’s outermost shores, which delineate the city’s well-defined contours in the middle of the lake.
Struck by the enormity of the temple precinct, Hernán Cortés was compelled to draw an analogy for Europeans; in his Second Letter, he writes,
“There is also one square twice as big as that of Salamanca….”
In the map, the precinct’s unfamiliar configuration of figures and shapes are sharply outlined in black on a smooth white surface. The Templo Mayor is formed by two central twin pyramids, connected at the baseline, and situated in the upper, or west, end of the precinct. Drawn in elevation, and presented as the reverse of its counterpart, each pyramid is formed by an ascending staircase and an adjoining tower, and each holds a shrine accessible from the pyramid’s summit.
Compressed in the aperture between the two pyramids, a human face, detached from his naked body below, announces the temple as the foremost site of human sacrifice in
Tenochtitlan.
From each of the precinct’s portals, four principal causeways radiate outward along rectilinear axes, transporting observers across the lake to the modest lakeside cities that reside on the outer shores. If drawn first to the
8 Cortés, Letters from Mexico, 103.
9 Mundy, “Mapping the Aztec Capital , ” 18.
20
imposing temple precinct at the map’s centre, these causeways specify other routes to follow. Each outbound movement along a causeway culminates in a city on the horizon. Yet, instead of travelling along the circular horizon to encounter the adjacent city, the fish-eye mode of representation forces viewers to rapidly retrace their movements back into the centre of Tenochtitlan only to be thrust out again along a different causeway. This struggle between distance and proximity – shifting back and forth between the temple precinct and the horizon – suggests that the map works on two levels. As I suggest in this chapter, the intersection of ritual and architecture in the temple precinct evokes a sense of place, the city of
Tenochtitlan, for European viewers. At the same time, however, the causeways channel the gaze towards the receding cities on the horizon, prompting a consideration of the intangibility of the frontier, an envisioning of what the future might hold.
In the Cortés map, the fish-eye perspective brings together diverse vantage points. While an imaginary viewpoint from above presents Tenochtitlan in plan, its various structures are drawn in elevation and in profile, as if to simulate the real experience of the city.
For most Europeans, an idea of Tenochtitlan would become forged almost exclusively through the medium of print, and specifically, through the repetition of this single image. Following its initial publication in
1524, the Cortés map would become one of the most widely disseminated images
10 Mundy also suggests that the houses, temples and the outer lakeshore present viewers with an image as if seen walking along the city’s streets. Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New
Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), xiii.
21
of the Atlantic world.
Gaining currency through its broad diffusion and longevity of publication, it was Tenochtitlan, as it manifests in this image and its subsequent derivations, which would become inscribed in Europeans’ geographical imagination. Indeed, until Arnoldus Montanus published a view of the city in 1671, conceptions of Tenochtitlan would depend largely on the visual precedents established by the Cortés map (fig. 6).
However, while Europeans continued to envisage Tenochtitlan, the city was blindly transformed into colonial
Mexico City.
Historiography
The Cortés map of Tenochtitlan, which was printed in Nuremberg, is believed to derive from a lost prototype that was dispatched along with the
Second Letter from Segura de la Frontera in New Spain on October 30, 1520.
In the Second Letter, initially destined for the Emperor Charles V, Cortés mentions that upon his entrance into the capital city he requested a series of maps from the Aztec ruler Moctezcuma, including an image of Tenochtitlan.
While this prototype is generally accepted as the model for the Cortés map, its elusive origins have garnered much speculation among scholars. While some suggest a companion of Cortés, in a recent study, Barbara E. Mundy persuasively argues for a native prototype.
She identifies similarities between the Cortés map and Aztec, specifically Culhua-Mexica, spatial representations and visual vocabularies.
11 Kagan, Urban Images, 64.
12 Ibid., 91.
13 Pagden, ‘Translator’s Introduction’ in Letters from Mexico, 1x.
14 Kagan, Urban Images, 64. I am relying on Richard L. Kagan’s spelling of Moctezcuma.
15 For a discussion of parallels in the ethnic group Culhua-Mexica’s visual vocabularies, see
Mundy, “Mapping the Aztec Capital,” 14-25.
22
Mundy concludes that an Aztec representation of Tenochtitlan served as the model for the Cortés map, though clearly the Nuremberg artist altered this native prototype with European visual conventions (1998).
While Mundy’s study is attentive to the visual imagery, most scholarly works only include the Cortés map in their broader studies of the Second Letter.
José Rabasa is concerned with the colonizing processes implicit in early modern representations, both written and visual. In his interrogation of the relations between Cortés and Moctezcuma, as described in the Second Letter, Rabasa introduces the Cortés map of Tenochtitlan to suggest the ways that cities in the new worlds come to represent “a new mode of discursivity.”
For Rabasa, the map of Tenochtitlan is symbolic; it is a palimpsest that contains Mesoamerican codes that, after the city’s conquest by the Spaniards, persist in modified form. In the map, Rabasa identifies antagonistic spatial practices, a concept borrowed from
Michel de Certeau.
For Rabasa, then, the map’s oppositional practices suggest a dialogical process, one that strategically positions Moctezcuma as the “master in servitude” (1993).
More recently, Ricardo Padrón situates the Cortés map within his larger project on discursive cartographies and the invention of America.
In his discussion of Cortés’ Second Letter, Padrón identifies two levels of analysis. He
16 Manuel Toussaint, Federico Gómez de Orozco and Justino Fernández, Planos de la Ciudad de
México (XVI Congreso Internacional de Planificación y de la Habitación; Mexico, Instituto de
Investigaciones Estéticas de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma, 1938), 98.
17 Rabasa, Inventing America, 100.
18 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steve Rendall (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984).
19
20
Rabasa, Inventing America, 103.
For the ways Padrón departs from Edmundo O’Gorman’s The Invention of America, see Ricardo
Padrón, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press: 2004), 18-27.
23
first engages with the letter, as it is articulated by Cortés himself, to suggests that it operates as a rhetorical device that proclaims the author’s achievements in New
Spain. The second level, which is more relevant to my project, deals with how
Cortés’ letter was formulated for European consumption. Padrón is interested in the ways different paratextual mechanisms elucidate the spatiality of the letter.
For Padrón, then, the Cortés map is a form of paratext that serves to reaffirm the
Second Letter as discursive cartography (2004).
These insightful readings of the Cortés map form the basis of this study; my project, however, is more concerned with how the visual imagery is working in compelling ways to call attention to the specificity of place, while, at the same time, revealing to viewers that this place no longer exists. Tenochtitlan, as it is conceived in the image, becomes a point of fixation among lands that sixteenthcentury Europeans were just beginning to apprehend. In this chapter, I argue that the Cortés map operates on two registers. First, I suggest that the representation of an island city, contained neatly within its borders, prompts Europeans to envision a particular place in the abyss of new worlds. By employing familiar visual conventions, such as the fish-eye view, the image moves between the imaginary and the descriptive to call attention to the central precinct where ritual and architecture intersect to conjure a vivid sense of place. Second, the image also functions as a ‘place-holder,’ as Stephen Greenblatt conceives the term.
For almost two centuries, the Cortés map and its later derivatives were the only
21 Ibid., 94.
22 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 60.
24
images of Tenochtitlan to be circulated in Europe. As a place-holder, then, the
Cortés map brackets an idea of a place for Europeans while another – Mexico
City - is constructed on its ruins.
Mapping Trends
The broad diffusion of the Cortés map attests to a burgeoning interest in understanding the physical world in the early modern period when conceptions of the oikenmene were quickly changing.
The rapidity with which the map was reproduced testifies to the sense of urgency among sixteenth-century Europeans to describe the physical world in which they lived. With the invention of the printing press, geographical knowledge became more readily available, permitting
Europeans to gain access to new information about the earth’s contours.
Print spurred a host of subsequent translations of the Latin edition into the vernacular languages of French, German and Italian, diffusing knowledge of Tenochtitlan to larger publics.
The first Italian edition, printed in Venice the same year as the original, included Nicolo Liburnio’s translation of both Cortés’ Second Letter and, intriguingly, the inscriptions on the map itself. Unlike the initial French and
German editions, which provided a translation of Cortés’ letter but published the map with its original Latin inscriptions, viewers of the Venice edition (1524) were able to discern, in Italian, the toponyms that dotted the map’s surface.
The surge in mapping in the early modern period is attributed, in part, to
Europeans’ encounters with unknown worlds and the rediscovery of Claudius
23 Schulz, “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice,” 453.
24 David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print: 1470-1550 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1994), 241.
25 For a review of different editions of Cortés’ Second Letter, see Pagden, ‘Translator’s
Introduction’ in Letters from Mexico, 1x-1xii.
25
Ptolemy’s ancient geographic manuscripts.
The introduction of Ptolemy’s
Geographia in Western Europe at the close of the fourteenth century provided
Europeans with a means of meticulously documenting the various landmasses that populated the earth.
Composed in the second century, Ptolemy’s Greek manuscripts organized the far-reaching parts of the world on a single spatial grid by charting the globe’s longitudinal and latitudinal lines on a flat surface.
The advent of a geometric surface provided Europeans with a template with which they could organize how the landmasses related to one another on a single plane.
With inflows of new information, Ptolemy’s grid provided a space on which knowledge about the physical world could be continuously updated.
30
The rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geographia coincided with scholarly initiatives in Western Europe to record, document, and render visible unknown cities, such as Tenochtitlan.
In 1406, Ptolemy’s text was translated into Latin by
Jacopo d’Angelo in Florence, and the following century witnessed over thirty editions of Geographia.
Reproduced in manuscript and eventually in print, which permitted it to be broadly circulated, the numerous editions of Ptolemy’s
26 Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 241. For a discussion specific to Venice, see
Cosgrove, “Mapping New Worlds.”
For the history of Ptolemy’s text, which was known as both Geographia and Cosmographia, see
Lucia Nuti, “The Perspective Plan in the Sixteenth Century: The Invention of a Representational
Language,” The Art Bulletin 76, no. 1 (1994), 105n4.
28 Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., “Florentine Interests in Ptolemaic Cartography as Background for
Renaissance Painting, Architecture, and the Discovery of America,” The Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians 33, no. 4 (1974): 282.
29
30
Ibid., 287.
31
Ibid.
32
Schulz, “Jacopo de’Barbari’s View of Venice,” 454.
David Woodward, “Maps and the Rationalization of Geographic Space,” in Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration, ed. Jay. A. Levenson (New Haven: Yale University
Press; Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1991), 84. See also Cosgrove, “Mappings New
Worlds,” 66.
26
Geographia testify to evolving ideas about the world and Europeans’ place in it.
This heightened interest in knowing the physical world, propelled by the rediscovery of a classical authority, was also fuelled in part by efforts to reconcile
Ptolemy’s understanding of the world with the contemporary explorative enterprises in the Atlantic and the Pacific.
Initially, Geographia was republished with the original maps included by Ptolemy, but subsequent editions utilized the
Ptolemaic grid to record worlds that were unknown to the ancients.
In the sixteenth century, Ptolemy’s study of the natural world was organized into three hierarchic categories.
Cosmography entailed the study of the universe, geography employed mathematics and scientific measurement to document larger regions of the earth, and chorography involved the study of the
Greek “choros,” or places, aimed to render a likeness of a specific place, such as a town or city.
While geography conceived of the ways individual parts, such as lands and oceans, came together to form a unified whole, chorography took as its subject the individual part. Ptolemy likens chorography to the study of an ear or an eye in relation to the entire head to suggest that the relationship between chorography and geography is one defined by the part to the whole.
However, as a scholar concerned primarily with geography, Ptolemy had only broadly
33 Schulz, “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice,” 454.
34 Ibid. See also Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 241.
35 Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye , 103.
36 Ibid.
37 Cosgrove, “Mapping New Worlds,” 66. I am drawing on Cosgrove’s translation, which is based on G. Ruscelli, La Geografia di Claudio Ptolomeo Alessandrino nuovamente tradotto di Greco in
Italiano da Girolamo Ruscelli (Venetia, 1561).
27
defined chorographic images.
Confronted with expanding worlds that required documentation, sixteenth-century scholars engaged with Ptolemy to sharpen his definition of chorography.
In 1533, Peter Apian, in his Cosmographicus Liber, suggested that chorography “carefully takes note of all particularities and properties, as small as they may be, that are worth noting in such places, such as ports, towns, villages, river courses, and all similar things, including buildings, houses, towers, walls, and the like…”
Another sixteenth-century scholar
Antoine du Pinet highlights a different aim of chorography in Plantes, pourtraits et descriptions de plusieurs villes et forteresses, tant de L’Europe, Asie, Afriquee que des Indes et Terres Neuves (1574). Chorography, du Pinet writes, attempts to
“show exclusively to the eye, in as lifelike a way as possible, the form, the position, the outskirts of the place it paints.”
Chorographic images were to present a reliable image of a city. This aim of chorography, then, was connected to the primacy of vision in the early modern period. Since antiquity, the truthfulness of images was believed to lie in direct observation, that is, in an eyewitness account of the object to be represented.
Claims to naturalism were undoubtedly important to sixteenth-century
Europeans, and anxieties about the faithfulness of images would have been
38 Lucia Nuti, “Mapping Places: Chorography and Vision in the Renaissance,” in Mappings, ed.
Denis Cosgrove (London : Reaktion Books, 1999), 91.
39
40
Ibid.
Petrus Apianus, Libro de cosmographia (Antwerp, 1548), ch.4, as quoted in Kagan, Urban
Images, 11.
41 Antoine du Pinet, Plantes, pourtraits et descriptions de plusieurs villes et fourtresses, tant de l’Europe, Asie, Afrique que les Indes et Terres Neuves (Lyon, 1564), xiv, as quoted in Nuti, “The
Perspective Plan,” 108.
42 Nuti, “The Perspective Plan,” 106n8.
28
heightened with representations of unknown worlds.
Charged with rendering visible Tenochtitlan, a city whose geographic removal forced viewers to invest in the veracity of the image, the Cortés map’s assertion of truthfulness would have been a priority. Engraved in Europe, the authenticity of the map would have been premised on the belief that it was a veritable reproduction of the original prototype that was dispatched by Cortés from New Spain. Both the map’s visual strategies, which I examine below, and the format in which the map was presented to Europeans reinforce the claim to a physical presence in Tenochtitlan.
Published in conjunction with the Second Letter, the map’s authority was, in part, forged through its symbiotic relationship with its accompanying text, which chronicled the conquistador’s firsthand impressions of the city. Cortés’ lengthy descriptions highlighted different aspects of its urban form, buttressing the map’s claims to naturalism for its literate audiences.
Urban Forms: A Fish-eye Perspective of Tenochtitlan
The Cortés map presents its viewers with a visual anomaly. It solicits interest in the specificity of place that was Tenochtitlan by mobilizing a visual vocabulary and an understanding of cities that were primarily European.
Representing Tenochtitlan in the guise of a European city, and employing a similar understanding of space, the map attempts to render the cityscape legible to its audiences.
Its fish-eye mode of representation fuses together diverse views of
43 Ibid., 107. In the introduction to Civitates, George’s Braun states that the artists of the city views in his collection employed the real towns as their models and not written accounts of the cities.
44 Kagan, Urban Images, 64.
45 For an overview of European conceptions of space, see P.D.A Harvey, The History of
Topographical Maps: Symbols, Pictures and Surveys (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980).
29
the city to offer a total vision of its urban fabric.
While certainly not a mimetic image, the map forged an idea of place across the Atlantic by prompting comparisons with the collection of images that circulated in sixteenth-century
Europe. Viewers would have likely been familiar with other fish-eye views of cities such as Hans Sebald Beheim’s Siege of Vienna (1529) and Konrad Morant’s
View of Strasbourg , engraved in 1548 (fig. 7).
By rendering the city of
Tenochtitlan in a familiar format, the Cortés map acquired a degree of objectivity.
In her study of sixteenth-century city views, Lucia Nuti emphasizes the extent to which apprehension of the physical world depends on how the city, as the object of representation, is constructed before viewers.
Nuti addresses the divergent modes of representation that take hold principally in Italy and in the northern regions of Europe. She differentiates between the Italian penchant for representing the city from an elevated, or perhaps imaginary viewpoint, as in the bird’s eye view, and the profile portrait that emerges in the North.
For Nuti,
“different visual cultures pursued different routes to totality,” suggesting that claims to truthfulness would have been heightened when the image paralleled a culture’s tradition of representing cities.
While the fish-eye view only emerged in selective cities across Europe, its synthesis of various perspectives, including
46 The fish-eye view brings together different vantage points into a single frame. For Lucia Nuti, a view is “expected to give a total knowledge of the town…It must bring together in what appears to be a record of one glance all the glances that the eye can take from different points of view… “
Nuti, “The Perspective Plan,” 109.
47 Kagan , Urban Images, 5.
48 Nuti, “Mapping Places,” 98.
49 Ibid. See also Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
50 Nuti, “Mapping Places,” 100.
30
profile and bird’s eye viewpoints, within a single radial scheme would have resonated with different visual cultures.
The multiple viewpoints made available in the fish-eye mode offers viewers different vantage points at which to examine Tenochtitlan. Unlike representations of European cities where viewers would have been encouraged to compare their phenomenological experience of discovering a city’s turns and bends to seeing it charted on paper, few, if any, viewers of the Cortés map would have been acquainted with the physical spaces of Tenochtitlan.
Instead, the map’s fish-eye perspective calls attention to both the temple precinct at the centre and to the city’s borders, which distinguish Tenochtitlan from its neighbouring cities. Isolated at the centre of the lake, the city was accessible exclusively by drawbridge causeways, which, as Cortés makes known in his Second Letter, could be lifted in times of defence.
As a chorographic view, whose contours are bound within the image, the map clearly identifies a fragment, a single part, of the lands across the Atlantic. Depicted planimetrically, the map highlights the city’s carefully delineated contours, translating a distant city into a specific place, which could then be affixed a meaning. James Akerman, in his study of atlases, suggests that regardless of whether the interiors of islands were known, “…[the island’s] shell provided a distinctive form by which the place might be recognized.”
For Akerman, island maps “…referred to palpable and spatially
51 For a discussion of the ways viewers could compare printed maps of Venice to experiences of walking the city, see Wilson, “From Myth to Metropole” in The World in Venice.
52
53
Cortés, Letters from Mexico, 84.
James Akerman, “On the Shoulders of a Titan: Viewing the World of the Past in Atlas
Structure.” (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, Department of Geography), 172.
31
certain things.”
The map of Tenochtitlan allowed viewers to circumscribe the city’s physical form in their minds, to understand not only its coordinates relative to the surrounding region, but the outline of the city itself.
In the Cortés map, Tenochtitlan’s urban form adheres to the principles of the ideal Renaissance city, which speak to early modern conceptions of utopian rationality, a subject I will address further in chapter three.
The application of mathematical principles to urban design, inspired by the earlier theories of
Vitruvius, were codified in texts such as Leon Battista Alberti’s De re
Aedificatoria , which was written in 1452, and printed in 1485.
A city’s dignity, as Alberti conceived it, was manifested in its architecture and its physical layout.
The city of Tenochtitlan, as represented in the map, boasts a rational design that consists of a symmetrical central square engulfed by rows of houses that were standardized in height. These references to urban ideals, which claim
Tenochtitlan as an ordered society, would surely have been identifiable to sixteenth-century viewers. While a native prototype might have served as a departure point in its creation, as Mundy suggests, the Cortés map couched this native understanding of space in a European visual vocabulary.
The Cortés map undoubtedly makes a claim for Tenochtitlan as a rational city, yet it is also working, perhaps more importantly, to call attention to the
54 Ibid., 190.
55 Many scholars have drawn parallels between Tenochtitlan, as it is represented in the Cortés map, and the ideal city discourse. See Ruth Eaton, Ideal Cities: Utopianism and the (Un)Built
Environment (London: Thames & Hudson, 202), especially chapters 3 and 4.
56 Eaton, Ideal Cities, 49.
57 Eaton 49. See also Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. J. Rykwert,
N. Leach and R. Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 191.
58 Mundy, “Mapping the Aztec Capital,” 13.
32
specificity of place. Although the fish-eye view presents multiple angles at which to contemplate the city, there are different visual strategies at work that guide viewers to linger on certain elements while passing rapidly over others. The map’s engraver has not sought to individualize the myriad of housing blocks that encircle the temple precinct. Instead, viewers are encouraged to move quickly across the smooth surfaces that reveal undifferentiated white domestic structures topped with uniform red roofs, which clearly adhere to European visual conventions. Grouped together, the circular patterns of housing units, emerging from the main plaza, repeatedly return the observer to the oversized temple precinct. The repetition of movement is heightened by the succession of concentric circles that near each other as their distance increases from the centre.
As Juergen Schulz contends in his discussion of a map of Strasbourg (1548), the fish-eye mode of projection privileges the centre of an image over its periphery (fig. 7).
The same is true in the Cortés map. Pressed up against the picture plane, the precinct’s proximity serves as a reminder that Tenochtitlan’s true sense of place resides in the image’s centre. It is where difference lurks within sameness.
59 Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain, xiii.
60 Juergen Schulz, La Cartografia tra Scienza et Arte: Carti e Cartografi nel Renascimiento
Italiano (Modena: F.C. Panini, 1990), 11-12. In his discussion of the Cortés map, Padrón also draws on Schulz’ discussion of fish-eye perspective, see Padrón, The Spacious Word, 128.
61 Scholars have generally referred to the temple precinct as barbarity circumscribed within civility. For Padrón, the idolatry of the Aztecs is surrounded by the civility of the Christian
Spaniards, which suggests that the Aztecs will soon be converted under the Spanish empire. See
Padrón, The Spacious Word, 129.
33
Architecture, Bodies, and Script: The Precinct as Stage
This theatrical arrangement of architecture, bodies, and script transforms the temple precinct into a stage, a locus of visual codes, which could be carefully scrutinized by Europeans eager to gain a sense of Tenochtitlan (fig. 8). The superimposition of geometric shapes – a square-shaped precinct rooted at the centre of the circular city – reveals the magnitude of the sacred square in relation to the overall cityscape. While the city’s physical form adheres to an ideal visual form, architectural elements in the precinct elicit visible disparities between Aztec civic rituals and European traditions. The visual spectacle of human sacrifice becomes an enunciation of cultural difference. The twin pyramids of the Templo
Mayor, whose summit was the principal site of sacrificial enactments, arrest the observer’s attention. As Cortés describes it, “amongst these temples there is one, the principle one, whose great size and magnificence no human tongue describe…”
Joined at the base, these twin pyramids are dedicated to the ancient
Culhua-Mexica god Tlaloc, the deity of agriculture and water, and to the tribal god Huitzilpochtli.
In the aperture between the twin pyramids is a head that has been severed from its body below. The dismembered body, depicted with spirals of blood that extend from its elongated arms, is located at the exact centre of the precinct and functions as a focal point. It establishes a visual junction between the architectural structures: the temple, where the sacrifice is performed, and the skull rack where the act becomes commemorated. The dismembered bodies of sacrificed individuals are tossed down the temple stairs where the tzompantli, or
62 Cortés, Letters from Mexico, 105.
63 Mundy, “Mapping the Aztec Capital,” 16.
34
skull racks, triumphantly displays their immortalized skulls .
Indeed, the architectural elements – the temples and the tzompantli – visualize rhythms of repetition that attest to a longstanding system of sacrificial practices.
In the Cortés map, the imposing temple precinct functions as a rhetorical device that evinces an idea of Tenochtitlan through the intersection of sacrificial ritual and architecture. Europeans would have been encouraged to draw on their own conceptions of cities, and the repertoire of city views that circulated in print in the sixteenth century.
Through this process of comparison, which evidently was made easier by representing Tenochtitlan in the garb of an ideal city, viewers would have been able to juxtapose the temple precinct with the central square in their own cities. For most Europeans, then, the precinct would have resonated as the city’s symbolic core where civic identity could be given visual form through the performance of ritual.
For theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, spaces accrue meaning through a process of territorialization.
For the Aztecs, the architectural structures depicted in the temple precinct only attain cultural significance once they have been re-territorialized through the performance of ritual. When human offerings are made, which was believed to maintain the cosmic order, the twin pyramids morph into the sacred Coatepec, home to
64 Mundy, “Mapping the Aztec Capital,” 18.
65 Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 240-244. See also Nuti, “The Perspective Plan.”
66 Edward Muir and Ronald F.E. Weissman, “Social and Symbolic Places in Renaissance Venice and Florence,” in The Power of Place: Bringing Together Geographical and Sociological
Imaginations, eds. John A. Agnew and James S. Duncan (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 93.
67 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine,” in A
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , trans. and foreword Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 381-382.
35
Huitzilpochtli and referred to as ‘Serpent Mountain.’
These piles of earth are only transformed through repetitive acts of sacrifice.
While Europeans were likely unfamiliar with the conversion of earthen temples into a sacred landscape, in reflecting on their own cities, they would have been able to recognize the ways different sites within the city - particularly the symbolic centre - become infused with meaning through ritualistic practices.
Intermingled with the architecture, the play of toponyms emphasizes the temple precinct. Calling on viewers to scrutinize the space vigilantly, the highest concentration of toponyms surface within these parameters. The city is identified by name once on the map; the capital letters that form ‘Temixtitan’ are divided equally between the two walls that flank the southern portal of the temple precinct. These textual inscriptions instruct on how the map’s different visual codes should be interpreted. They compel us to move between the unfamiliar architectural shapes and the inscriptions that explain their ritualistic functions.
Written above the twin pyramids is the Latin inscription Templum ubi sacrificant , which designates the main temple where sacrifice is executed. Below the lower skull rack, capita sacrificatoru refers to the heads of sacrificed.
The toponyms strategically highlight certain features within the precinct by underscoring their functions for literate audiences.
68 Mundy, “Mapping the Aztec Capital,” 22.
69 Mundy, “Mapping the Aztec Capital,” 21.
70 For examples in early modern Europe, see Muir and Weissman, “Social and Symbolic Places” in The Power of Place, 81-101; and Steven Mullaney, “Civic Rites, City Sites: The Place of the
Stage,” in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, eds.
David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York: Routledge, 1991), 17-26.
71 For an index of the toponyms on the Cortés map, see Mundy, “Mapping the Aztec Capital,” 32.
36
Figures of the Frame
Two framing mechanisms - a Latin epigram and the chart of the Gulf of
Mexico – occupy the borders of the Cortés map. To the viewer’s left, outside the confines of the city, these devices pursue what Louis Marin, in his discussion of maps and portraits, understands to be the “effects of reflective opacity.”
For
Marin, the frame and its figures are mechanisms that permit representation to function on two levels. While its transitive function allows representation to present what is absent, such as the city of Tenochtitlan, its reflexive dimension presents itself as representation.
The epigram and the chart provide instructions for how the image of Tenochtitlan should be experienced and, more importantly, provide a context for its interpretation.
Working in tandem, these mechanisms, which occupy the map’s margins and borders, inscribe Tenochtitlan in different spatial and temporal narratives.
Adjacent to the circular image of Tenochtitlan is a chart of the Gulf of Mexico
(fig. 1). The prototype for the chart remains unknown though scholars have suggested that it might be based on the cloth map presented to Cortés by
Moctezcuma.
Resembling a medieval portolan, the chart includes Florida, the tip of Cuba and extends to the coasts of Guatemala and Honduras.
The ovalshaped body of water is punctuated by a series of cities that operate only as placenames. While the chorographic image of Tenochtitlan represents a particular
72 Louis Marin, “The Frame of Representation and Some of Its Figures,” in On Representation, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 361.
73
74
Ibid., 352- 353.
Cortés, Letters from Mexico, 94. In the Second Letter, Cortés writes, “On the following day they brought me a cloth with all the coast painted on it…”
75 Padrón, The Spacious Word, 125.
37
place, the chart of the Gulf provides the context.
As a mapping of a region, the chart positions the city in a wider geography to suggest how the part fits with the whole.
Proper names work to inscribe meaning in the landscape; they distinguish various geographical parts from each other. Like the toponyms within the temple precinct, the place-names on the chart of the Gulf call attention to specific sites.
As Richard Helgerson aptly notes, “at the root of all representation is differentiation.”
Place, he continues, “…can be represented only if it can be in some way distinguished from its surroundings.”
The chart reveals a series of place-names that encircle the Gulf of Mexico, including the city given the Spanish name “Sevilla” by Cortés.
From the coastal city of Sevilla, Cortés journeyed inland into the capital city of Tenochtitlan, an itinerary that can be traced by shifting between the chart and the textual references to this expedition in the
Second Letter.
While the toponyms encourage movement from one place to another, they have another function. They strengthen the distinction between, for example, Sevilla, a city whose contours remained undefined, and the sharp borders that demarcate Tenochtitlan. The place-names insist on a process of differentiation between what are merely suggestions of cities, as articulated by toponyms, and the specific place evoked in the image of Tenochtitlan.
76 Ibid.
77 Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: the Elizabethan Writing of England
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 135.
78
79
Ibid.
80
Cortés, Letters from Mexico, 125.
Padrón, The Spacious Word, 125.
38
Above the chart, a Latin inscription functions as another framing device with a temporal dimension. However, it suggests a temporal ambiguity that powerfully dislodges Tenochtitlan from the present at the moment the map is seen. The epigram reads, “This commonwealth had once been powerful and a realm of the greatest glory. [It] has been subjected to the rule of Caesar [Charles
V]. He is truly outstanding. The Old World and the New [now] belong to him, and another is laid open to his auspices.”
As José Rabasa has noted, the pluperfect tense of the verb (had-been) unambiguously positions this city in the realm of the past.
For Rabasa, the map represents an imaginary projection of a city.
When the map was first printed in Nuremberg in 1524, Tenochtitlan was far from the place represented on the map; it had already begun its radical transformation after it was conquered in 1521. The Spaniards would embark on a building campaign that would significantly alter the cityscape, supplanting the symbolic temple precinct with a host of European architectural structures.
By 1524, when the
Cortés map was first published, the urban spaces that had once been Tenochtitlan had evolved into a new place, Mexico City, under Spanish rule.
Intriguingly, the epigram’s explicit reference to the past, which detaches
Tenochtitlan from the present, seems to capture the ambiguity of place in this moment of transition. To the right from the epigram, the unmistakable Hapsburg banner waves from the heights of a tower on the southwest shores of Lake
81 Translation in Kagan, Urban Images, 67.
82 Rabasa, Inventing America, 100-101.
83 Ibid.
84 Kagan, Urban Images, 91.
39
Texcoco.
The oversized token of Charles V’s presence, compressed between the image’s unyielding margins and the lakeshore city, appears in the same corner as
Montezuma’s palaces, which seem diminutive in comparison. The banner ensures recognition of the new regime. It is as if we are made witnesses to the moment of change when Tenochtitlan was sequestered by the Spanish and absorbed into its emerging transatlantic empire.
The map represents a process of becoming. It is an image of a place that eludes the present yet brackets a space for the future.
Although the map depicts
Tenochtitlan, it is an image that gives visual form to a city of the past. With each subsequent reproduction of the image after 1524, the gap widened between
Europeans’ perception of Tenochtitlan and the colonial city emerging on its ruins.
Embedded in the surface of the map is a configuration of visual codes that calls up the disjunction between the image and the present, prompting viewers to imagine a new city under Charles V.
In pointing to the changing status of
Tenochtitlan, the map operates on a second register. It functions as a ‘placeholder’ as Stephen Greenblatt understands the term.
Greenblatt characterizes the openness of Christopher Columbus’ words – “And there I found very many islands filled with people innumerable, and of them all I have taken possession for
85 Padrón, The Spacious Word, 129.
86 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Introduction: Rhizome,” in A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , trans. and foreword Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
87 Rabasa, Inventing America, 101. In his discussion of the Cortés map, Rabasa also suggests the possibilities of imagining a new city.
88 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 60
40
their highnesses”
- as a place-holder for future encounters.
For Greenblatt, then, the term involves reserving a space for the “unknown and unimaginable.”
In the Cortés map, the image of Tenochtitlan secures an idea of a city for
Europeans while another indescribable place - Mexico City - commenced its formation.
The map’s function as a place-holder was forged through repetitions of a single image and its subsequent derivatives. For nearly two centuries, the map evoked a place that no longer existed yet whose authority was forged through its wide dissemination across Europe. While the map conjured an idea of
Tenochtitlan at its centre, the horizon held within it what might be described, in the words of Elizabeth Grosz, as “a promise… [of ] another thing.”
The robust causeways radiate outward, past the outer contours of Tenochtitlan, towards the receding cities on the horizon. For Ricardo Padrón, and other scholars, this horizon “speaks of new worlds to conquer,” soliciting the viewer’s imagination of the possibilities of further expansion.
Yet, while the horizon might have enabled Europeans to envision new lands beyond the boundaries of the known, it would have also pressed them to consider the future of Tenochtitlan, a city’s whose own frontiers were drastically altered with the arrival of the Spanish.
The Cortés map appears at a moment when Tenochtitlan was rapidly undergoing transition from Aztec to Spanish regime. While the map conceals the
89 Select Documents Illustrating the Four Voyages of Columbus, trans. and ed. Cecil Jane, 2 vols.
(London: Hakluyt Society, 1930), i. 2, as quoted in Greenblatt 60.
90
91
92
Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 60.
Ibid.
Elizabeth Grosz, “The Thing,” in Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real
Space, foreword Peter Eisenman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 169.
93 Padrón, The Spacious Word, 131.
41
real city of Tenochtitlan, or what had become a thriving Mexico City, at the same time, it becomes an archetypal image for the multitude of replications that derive from it. In 1524, the Cortés map announces itself as a representation of a place removed in time and space from viewers. However, as future images of
Tenochtitlan emerge into public view, they begin to shed their historical specificity. Instead, as I discuss in the next chapters, Tenochtitlan is mobilized within island books and travel narratives to project imaginary conceptions of the new world city, often revealing, intriguingly, Europeans’ own mounting concerns.
42
Chapter Two - Insular Topographies: Tenochtitlan, Venice, and the
Mirroring Effect in Benedetto Bordone’s Libro
To the ‘most Serene Prince and most Illustrious Senate’ of Venice,
Benedetto Bordone writes in 1526, “Your very faithful servant, …, Illuminator, humbly appears before your Lordships, explaining the fact that he worked day and night for many years in composing a book which treats all the islands of the world, both ancient and modern, with their ancient and modern denominations, sites, customs, stories, legends and other things related to them, situating them in their places in an orderly fashion.”
Bordone’s petition to secure printing privileges for his isolario , or island book, is also telling for his readers. Impressed on the opening pages of Libro di Benedetto Bordone nel quale si ragiona tutte l’Isole del mondo (1528), the request reveals the author’s innovative inclusion of newly encountered islands. Printed in Venice in 1528, Bordone’s Libro de
Benedetto Bordone transforms the isolarii’s exclusive focus on the Aegean, which had characterized the genre for over a century, to comprise islands in the Atlantic.
Departing from early isolarii, Bordone’s Libro compelled viewers to imagine the world in innovative ways. Reorienting their gaze westward,
Europeans were invited to envision unfamiliar ocean space as a collection of islands. These islands, which repeatedly pushed back the horizon, became
“mental stepping stones”
that permitted knowledge about the changing image of
1 Venice, Archivio di Stato, Atti del Senato (Terra); 6 March 1526, as printed in Bordone, Il Libro di Benedetto Bordone , f.Aaiv. For an English translation, see Armstrong, “Benedetto Bordone,
‘Miniator,’” 91.
2 See John R. Gillis, “Islands as Mental Stepping-Stones in the Age of Discovery,” in Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004), 45-64.
the globe to manifest itself in increments.
Christianity had inherited from antiquity an idea of the globe as an archipelago, that is, a central world-island with three continents. As islands emerged in the Atlantic, including Tenochtitlan,
Europeans were confronted with probing questions about how these islands fit into accepted understandings of the globe.
After its initial publication in 1524, the Cortés map of Tenochtitlan (fig. 1) staged its first reappearance in print in Bordone’s Libro of 1528 (fig. 4).
Bordone, however, implements important changes that suggest a decidedly different approach to how the image should be perceived. While the Cortés map actively draws viewers into the theatrical temple precinct, calling attention to pagan Aztec social practices, in Bordone’s version, the precinct is emptied of its suggestive skull racks. The central decapitated figure that had previously announced the sacrificial enterprise in Tenochtitlan has now regained his head.
Furthermore, the intriguing fish-eye perspective of the Cortés map has been supplanted by the use of perspective whose lines converge at the central figure.
This change in perspective is indicative of the image’s new context within the genre of isolarii . While the multiple horizon lines in the Cortés image propel viewers to envisage what lay beyond Tenochtitlan’s frontiers, Bordone’s map compresses the gaze within the outlines of the city. It works instead to direct attention to Tenochtitlan’s urban form, prompting awareness of the distinction
3 Frank Lestringant, “Utopia and the Reformation,” in Utopia: the Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World , eds. Roland Schaer, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent (New
York: The New York Public Library: Oxford University Press, 2000), 164.
4 The 1524 Cortés map was republished with Italian toponyms later that year in Venice.
5 Tom Conley, The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 181.
44
between land and sea. Indeed, Bordone’s map solicits interest in Tenochtitlan as an island, one whose singular designation as an island city, fuels its comparison with another island city in Bordone’s volume, Venice.
Historiography
The is an intriguing genre that appears primarily in the Italian context from the fifteenth until the seventeenth century. While scholarship has undoubtedly engaged with the isolarii , the genre is generally addressed in specific case studies, or included in broader works devoted to developments in early modern mapping and globalization.
Scholars have also brought forward the remarkable intersections between the isolarii and early modern literature.
Yet few studies have directed particular attention to how the visual imagery in the isolarii , as a genre devoted entirely to mapping islands, is working in specific ways, and how the images bring forward pressing issues that would have resonated with sixteenth-century Europeans.
A number of scholars, however, in their engagements with different questions have briefly touched upon the fascinating visual parallels that, beginning with Benedetto Bordone’s Libro , are drawn between Venice and
Tenochtitlan. Lilian Armstrong’s study is primarily concerned with drawing connections between Bordone’s career as a miniaturist and his achievements in cartography. She is attentive to the ways the pairing of these two cities would have partly been informed by Bordone’s shared intellectual pursuits and associations with Venetian patricians, such as Giovanni Battista Ramusio and
6 Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye.
7 Conley, The Self-Made Map.
45
Andrea Navagero. During his tenure as Venetian ambassador to the Emperor
Charles V from 1524-26, Navagero first extols “la grande città di Temistitan”
(1996). For Tom Conley, the isolario is a genre grounded in the heterogeneity of its parts where alterity is inscribed in the relation between image and text, in the islands and their surrounding waters. Conley suggests the pairing of Venice and
Tenochtitlan visualizes a “familiar alterity” where the otherness of Tenochtitlan in the Cortés map is displaced in Bordone’s Libro by an appeal to the presence of man.
Yet, for Conley, this claim to an anthropocentric unity is eradicated by the very juxtaposition of these two cities where one inevitably dislodges the other
(1996).
Frank Lestringant, who offers a comprehensive study of island books produced in Europe in the early modern period, devotes considerable attention to
Venice as a “ville-archipel.” Like Conley, Lestringant is mindful of the ways the map of Tenochtitlan is manipulated to adhere to the form demanded by the isolario , and how it came to resemble Venice. Lestringant is also interested in the ways Tenochtitlan and Venice are brought together differently in isolarii and cosmographies (2002).
Most recently, David Y. Kim has brought forward a number of sixteenth-century references to comparisons made between
Tenochtitlan and Venice. In the pairing in Bordone’s Libro, which, for Kim, contrasts a Christian Venice with a pagan Tenochtitlan, Kim suggests that
8 Armstrong, “Benedetto Bordone, ‘Miniator,’” 83; and Claudio Griggio, “Andrea Navagero e l’Itinerario in Spagna (1524-1528),” in Miscellanea di studi in onore di Marco Pegararo, I. Da
Dante a Manzoni, ed. Bianca Maria Da Rif and Claudio Griggio (Florence, Olschki, 1991), 153-
9
78.
10
11
Conley, The Self-Made Map, 180.
Conley, The Self-Made Map, 187.
Frank Lestringant, Le Livre des Îles: Atlas et Récits Insulaires de la Genèse à Jules Verne
(Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2002).
46
Tenochtitlan becomes a “dialectical mirror” for Venetians that reflects both a
“hedonistic and destroyed civilization” and a utopian model for the future
(2006).
This chapter draws on earlier scholarship, but departs from it by examining how the visual imagery in Bordone’s Libro elicits comparisons between Tenochtitlan and Venice, and how this pairing brings forward important temporal and religious issues that have wider implications in sixteenth-century
Europe. Beginning with the early isolarii of Cristoforo Buondelmonti and
Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti, I trace the renewed interest in the past, particularly the classical ruins in the ancient Mediterranean, to then examine how this becomes complicated by the temporal differences that become apparent with the inclusion of the Atlantic in Bordone’s Libro . From the general, I move into the specific ways geography and history are connected in the woodcuts of Venice and
Tenochtitlan. In Bordone’s Libro, the world reveals itself in its various parts, parts whose diverse geographies’ can be interpreted together. I suggest that the pairing of Venice and Tenochtitlan, brought together through the active participation of viewers, prompts reflections on the otherness of Tenochtitlan, a temporal and religious otherness that coalesces around concerns about origins. If the Church saw islands as its jurisdiction in the early modern period, the last part of this chapter considers how these claims become implicated in the pairing of
Tenochtitlan and Venice. I suggest that the images make a compelling argument
12 Kim, “Uneasy Reflections,” 91.
47
for Christianisation, yet in a way that pays tribute to Venice, the Libro’s city of publication.
The Isolarii as Genre: Cristoforo Buondelmonti and Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti
The isolarii emerged in the fifteenth century and continued to appear, primarily in the Italian peninsula, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The genre grew out of medieval portolan charts used by navigators to document the coastal outlines of the well-travelled Aegean.
Unlike other forms of medieval mapmaking such as the ecclesiastical mappemundi , which privilege the symbolic idea of Christian origins over topographical accuracy, the portolan charts were notably faithful representations intended to guide navigators along the coastlines.
They were careful to locate, with rhumb lines, the minuscule islands of the Aegean as landmasses for these purposes; however, rarely did these charts represent the islands’ interiors in considerable detail.
Venetian, along with
Genoese, mariners were familiar with the islands of the Greek archipelago, as the
Aegean Sea was known, where struggles with their eastern neighbours, the Turks, were continuously played out over the control of trade.
As a foremost publishing centre in Europe with commercial ties to the east, Venice quickly became the centre of isolarii production.
17
13 Hilary Louise Turner, “Christopher Buondelmonti and the Isolario,” Terrae Incognitae 19
(1987): 12.
14
15
Woodward, “Maps and the Rationalization of Geographic Space,” 83.
16
17
Turner, “Christopher Buondelmonti and the Isolario,” 12.
Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye, 91.
Lestringant, Le Livre des Îles, 89. For a discussion of Venetian artistic relations with the Turks, see Stefano Carbone, ed., Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797, trans. Deke Dusinberre (New
York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007).
48
With twenty different isolarii,
the genre boasted various combinations of text and image, which eventually prepared the way for the world atlas that would materialize in the late sixteenth century.
The first isolario is thought to be
Cristoforo Buondelmonti’s Liber insularum arcipelagi (1420), a collection of seventy-nine images of islands in the Aegean Sea, which is known through its 64 extant copies.
Although initially in search of Greek manuscripts during his travels through the Aegean, in the preface to his Liber, Buondelmonti makes known his intentions to narrate the historical events that unfold in these places from antiquity until the present.
According to P.D.A. Harvey, the Florentine ecclesiastic’s Liber is “a disorderly mixture of fact, fiction, and fantasy, compiled from personal observation, hearsay, and a variety of historical and poetic sources whose authors are frequently named.”
Buondelmonti’s active quest for ancient monuments, that is, his attempt to locate the past within the present, is revealed in his depictions of classical ruins and their accompanying textual descriptions.
While first dedicated to his patron, Cardinal Giordano Orsini, the interest in mapping islands in the Aegean among early modern individuals is suggested by
18 P.D.A Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography in Medieval Europe,” in The History of
Cartography , eds. J.B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987), vol. 1, chap. 20, 482.
19 See R.A. Skelton, ed. ‘Bibliographical Note’ in Libro ... de tutte l’isole del mondo, Venice, 1528 by Benedetto Bordone (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1966), v; and Akerman, “On the
Shoulders of a Titan.”
20 Turner, “Christopher Buondelmonti and the Isolario,” 13.
21 Ibid.
22 Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography in Medieval Europe,” 482.
23 Brown, Venice & Antiquity , 78.
49
various translations of Buondelmonti’s manuscript into Italian, Greek and
English.
Over half a century later, about 1485, the Venetian shipmaster Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti presented Europeans with his Isolario . Substituting the descriptive prose of Buondelmonti, Bartolomeo includes sonnets that describe the islands in rhyme. As the first printed isolario , a status granted by recent technological innovations, Bartolomeo’s text is one that conspicuously separates image and text.
The maps are represented on the recto of the printed sheet and the sonnets on its verso, with place-names imbedded within the sonnets.
As Tom Conley suggests, each poem is equated with the representation of island, drawing a visual parallel between ”an insular unit of writing…[and] a fragment of land.”
The Isolario’s forty-nine islands divulge little topographical detail of the island interiors and, instead, Bartolomeo focuses almost exclusively on their coastlines, gathering the smaller islands together instead of depicting each on its own.
Displaying his islands in relation to a circle with eight windrays, Bartolomeo heralds his own innovative use of both compass and personal observation to map the islands of the
Aegean.
While the Isolario was mostly geared towards educated audiences, the
24 Turner, “Christopher Buondelmonti and the Isolario,” 13. For a specific case study on maps of
Constantinople, see Ian R. Manners, “Constructing the Image of a City: The Representation of
Constantinople in Christopher Buondelmonti’s Liber Insularum Archipelagi Annals of the
Association of American Geographers 87, no. 1 (1997): 72-102.
25
26
27
Tom Conley, “Virtual Reality and the Isolario ” Annali d’Italianistica 14 (1996): 121.
Ibid., 122.
28
Turner, “Christopher Buondelmonti and the Isolario,” 25.
Skelton, ‘Bibliographical Note,’ v.
50
inclusion of bar-scales and windroses also garnered, to some extent, a practical interest among travellers.
Receding Horizons: Benedetto Bordone’s Libro and the Islands in the
Atlantic
In 1528, Benedetto Bordone’s inclusion of islands in the Atlantic revolutionized the genre. Dedicated to his nephew, Baldassare Bordone, the Libro opens with three large-scale maps of Europe, the Aegean, and the world, each spread over two pages.
Raised to an imaginary viewpoint, the book consolidates the multiple islands known to sixteenth-century Europeans. Bordone’s Libro fuses together text and image to present early modern viewers with a parcelled image of a rapidly expanding world. Encased in double rectangular frames, the 104 woodcuts of islands align evenly with their accompanying prose, permitting a degree of fluidity between text and image. Divided into three sections, Bordone’s collection foregrounds the islands of the Atlantic world in the first book with 22 maps, including a city view of Tenochtitlan. With 74 islands, the second book is dedicated to the islands of the Mediterranean with a focus on Venice, whose contours are displayed prominently across the Libro’s centrefold. The third book closes the isolario with eight woodcuts of islands in East Asia and the Indian
Ocean. First printed in 1528 by Nicolò d’Aristotile detto Zoppino, Bordone’s
29 Conley, “Virtual Reality,” 122.
30 For a discussion of these maps, see Armstrong, “Benedetto Bordone, ‘Miniator,’” 90; Roberto
Almagià, “Intorno alle carte e figurazioni annesse all’Isolario di Benedetto Bordone,” Maso
Finiguerra 2 (1939): 170-83; and Massimo Donattini, Spazio e modernità: Libri, carte, isolari nelle’età delle scoperte. (Bologna: CLUEB, 2000).
51
Libro saw four later editions between 1534 and 1560, slightly modified at each turn to incorporate recent discoveries.
In tribute to the Libro’s city of publication, a bird’s eye view of Venice, measuring 230 mm x 326 mm, is spread luxuriously over two pages at its centre
(fig. 3).
Derived, in part, from Jacopo de Barbari’s impressive woodcut of 1500
(fig. 2), the map displays the city’s multiple islands bound together to form a collective whole.
In this view of Venice, eight windrays, inherited from portolan charts, radiate outward from a central point in the Bacino. Like other islands in
Bordone’s collection, the careful installation of rhumb lines and compass roses attempts to anchor the image in space.
In addition to these visual mechanisms, which circumscribe each individual part of the globe in its place, the Libro is conceptualized within a system of taxonomy that divides the world into three. Located adrift in oceanic space, islands were often difficult to situate geographically, a feat that worked to the benefit of early modern imperial aspirations.
Bordone’s endeavour to situate islands “in their places in an orderly fashion,” as elucidated in his request for printing privileges, becomes evident in the book’s format. The Libro sought to organize and, to an extent, stabilize islands that floated far beyond the
31 For example, Pizarro’s account of the conquest of Peru appears in the edition of 1534. See
Robert W. Karrow, Jr., Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century and Their Maps: Bio-Bibliographies of the Cartographers of Abraham Ortelius, 1570 (Chicago, Speculum Orbis Press, 1993), 92-93.
32 Ibid., 91.
33 Juergen Schulz, “The Printed Plans and Panoramic Views of Venice, 1486-1797,” Saggi e
Memorie di Storia dell’Arte 7 (1970): 22. For a discussion of the de’ Barbari map, see Wilson, The
World in Venice, especially chapter one.
34 Bordone’s map of Tenochtitlan does not display a visible compass and wind roses. However,
Conley suggests that, if it were represented, the wind roses would cross at the man’s navel. See
Conley, The Self-Made Map, 181.
35 Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye, 94.
52
boundaries of Europe. Its uniform structure permits a degree of congruity in an enterprise that sought to bring together the globe’s diverse parts. Each island is presented as “a self-contained world”
where north is positioned at the top of the page though not consistently at centre, but often at either northeast or northwest.
Enclosed neatly within a pair of rectangular frames, the islands’ dissimilar shapes are offered up to viewers for comparison.
Despite their classification into different sections, the islands, devoid of sequential narrative, can be experienced in a multitude of ways. Hemmed into descriptive prose that enunciates important historical events, these spatial representations become connected to each other through the fluidity of text. For
Tom Conley, the images work to stabilize the flow of text, which he compares to the tumultuous sea.
While rigid frames propagate decisive boundaries between text and image, Bordone’s careful alignment of the two on each page promotes a continuity that successfully channels the gaze from one image to another. Inspired by travel, and derived from portolan charts, the isolario was a dynamic enterprise that had no established beginning nor end, but invited viewers to select how the images were to be experienced.
In this “virtual” journey through the world,
viewers elected how to travel between islands, migrating through oceanic space in a way that ruptured its undifferentiated nature. They were encouraged to create their own itineraries in what Michel de Certeau might call “operations” of
36 Ibid., 91.
37 Turner, “Christopher Buondelmo nti and the Isolario,” 26.
38 Conley, “Virtual Reality,” 122.
39 Conley, The Self-Made Map , 187.
40 Conley, “Virtual Reality.”
53
space.
Individual trajectories “weave places together,”
collapsing distances between images and permitting active contemplation of similarities. Removed from each other spatially in Bordone’s Libro , two islands – Venice and
Tenochtitlan – could be brought into dialogue through viewers’ manipulations of space.
A Play of Resemblances between Tenochtitlan and Venice
The dislodgement of Tenochtitlan from its place among islands of the
Atlantic to bring it into dialogue with Venice occurs through the active engagement of viewers. However, as a form of paratext, Bordone calls attention to similarities between the two island cities. Introducing his own subjectivity into the accounts of Tenochtitlan, which are drawn from Hernán Cortés’ Second
Letter, Bordone announces the congruencies between the urban topographies.
Urging viewers to interpret the two cities together, he writes, “And moreover for the defense of the city, there are still many other [things] in order to be a city like
Venice, situated in water, the province is completely surrounded by the greatest mountains, and the plain is two hundred and eighty miles in circumference, in which are situated two lakes.”
Bordone’s textual interjection, introduced during his narrations of Tenochtitlan, encourages Venetians to reflect on this isla nd’s distinct ive topography when they encountered the image of their native city.
41 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 119.
42 Ibid., 97.
43 For the English translation, see Armstrong, “Benedetto Bordone, ‘Miniator,’” 90n98. “& anchora per defensione della citta, cene sono anchora de molti altri per esser la citta como Venetia, posta in acqua, la provincia è tutta circondata da mo[n]ti grandissimi, & la pianura è de circo[n]data di miglia duecento ottanta, nella quale somo duo laghi posti…” Bordone, Libro, fol.
VIIv.
54
The representation of Tenochtitlan in Bordone’s Libro (fig. 4) would have resonated with viewers, especially Venetians, who would have been struck by the ways this floating city in the vastness of new worlds, mirrored their own. For sixteenth-century Europeans, resemblance was a means by which new information could be grasped by bringing it into established frameworks of knowledge. As Michel Foucault observes, resemblance permitted “…the knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them.”
Representation as a form of repetition, following Foucault, translates a city residing far beyond the contours of the lagoon, into a familiar framework where its urban topography is made to resemble Venice.
While the majority of islands in Bordone’s Libro are displayed with scant pictorial detail, Tenochtitlan’s urban centre is replete with configurations of domestic structures and bridges, petitioning viewers to interpret the city as Venice’s new world counterpart.
Indeed, the adaptations made by Bordone to the Cortés map of Tenochtitlan (fig.
1), which was printed four years earlier, are significant. No longer represented as a circular city, as Manuel Toussaint aptly notes, the perimeters of Tenochtitlan have been radically altered and transformed into an asymmetrical geometric shape.
References to Aztec sacrificial rituals have been subdued, and the map’s orientation has shifted from northwest to northeast, becoming an inversion of its original form.
The implementation of perspective, which draws viewers into the centre, coupled with the stark contrast between the naturalism employed in the
44 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York:
Vintage Books, 1994), 17.
45
46
Ibid.
47
Toussaint, Planos de la Ciudad de México , 94.
Ibid., 93-94.
55
city, as opposed to the numerous blank spaces on the outer shores, designates
Tenochtitlan, like Venice, as both city and island. Through this pairing, the elusive island city of the new world is visually linked to what, for Venetians, as residents of a major publishing centre filled with print shops, would be the recognizable landscape of their city.
By foregrounding similarities, and neutralizing difference, the pairing of Tenochtitlan and Venice strings together far-flung islands of the world, opening up pos sibilities for interpretation that link topogra phy to history.
Histories of Origins, Toponyms and Venice
The isolarii’s initial focus on the Aegean Sea was connected, in part, to a revived interest in classical antiquity during the early modern period. While the genre grew out of the medieval portolan charts that were used to navigate the
Aegean for maritime trade, the allure of antiquities made these islands desirable for intellectuals committed to learning the ways of the ancients.
Located at the intersections of East and West, these islands were replete with remnants of past histories, both pagan and Christian, of a number of civilizations.
Buondelmonti’s affinity for ancient ruins – visual remnants of the past that manifested themselves on the islands – becomes evident in both his textual descriptions and, most notably, in his maps. Indeed, in the manuscript copy of
Liber Insularum held by Pope Pius II, classical ruins reveal themselves on twenty-
48 Wilson, The World in Venice, 60; Woodward, Maps as Prints , 83.
49 Brown, “Antique Fragments, Renaissance Eyes,” in Venice & Antiquity, 75-92.
50 Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography in Medieval Europe,” 483-4.
56
three of the islands represented.
After the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in
1453, these islands became increasingly closed off to Europeans throughout the sixteen th century. This endowed the isolario with the important task of providing visual access to these histories in, what Lestringant refers to as, “a voyage by proxy” through the islands of the Aegean.
While Buondelmonti, and later Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti, were concerned with revealing ancient ruins in the islands of the Aegean, Benedetto Bordone’s
Libro of 1528 takes a more global approach with the insertion of islands in the
Atlantic. By bringing together the diverse parts of the globe in a single publication, the collection of maps offered a glimpse of the world, an image where temporal lapses between places are momentarily effaced. For Conley, the inclusion of rhumb lines, derived from portolan charts used by navigators, transforms viewers of Bordone’s maps into eyewitnesses, simulating the experience of the places represented.
This was reinforced by Bordone’s inclusion of firsthand accounts of islands by different authors, permitted viewers to experience other peoples and places in the present, and collapsing the historical distance betw een them and the authors.
54 While the inclusion of eyewitness accoun ts of these islands initially brings together the moment of encounter with
51 BMV, Cod. Lat X, 124 (3177). Cf. BMV. Cod. Lat IXV, 45 (4595), as quoted in Brown Venice
& Antiquity, 78.
52 Frank Lestringant, “Cartographics: An Experience of the World and an Experiment on the
World,” in Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of
Discovery, trans. David Fausett with a foreword by Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994), 109.
53 Conley, The Self-Made Map, 178-79.
54 Conley, The Self-Made Map,
narrative.
178-79. Bordone would introduce these quotations into his
57
Europeans’ experience of it, it also compels them to consider the historicity of each place.
Bordone’s use of text plays an important role in elucidating the temporal distances, in the minds of Europeans, between the various places represented. As a genre concerned with islands and, to an extent, remnants of the past, Bordone’s insertion of new worlds raises questions about histories, histories whose uncertainties become increasingly evident through the very structure of Bordone’s isolario . Indeed, Bordone derives his material from the classical texts of Ptolemy,
Homer, Ovid, and Pliny the Elder, yet he also draws on medieval and modern accounts such as Marco Polo and, of particular interest, Hernán Cortés.
55
Presen ted with a compilation of classical, medieval, and modern material, readers would have been attentive to the ways that knowledge of Tenochtitlan was drawn exclusively from Cortés’ Second Letter. Dated only a few years before the publication of Bordone’s Libro, the letter articulates a history of Tenochtitlan that, for Europeans, only begins with the arrival of the Spanish.
For Tenochtitlan, as well as for other newly encountered islands, this gap in historical narrative would have been reinforced through the insertion of text on the maps themselves. Bordone’s inclusion of multiple place-names on his maps visually reiterates the differences between the world known to the ancient and islands recently encountered in the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries.
Here, legibility and visibility are brought together through the use of toponyms.
As Christian Jacob acutely notes, “on the one hand, [there is] the weight of
55 Armstrong, “Benedetto Bordone, ‘Miniator,’” 82.
58
tradition and of heritage, the Greco-Roman bedrock of the Christian west; on the other, [there are] lands to be named and the very moment of their discovery…“
In Bordone’s Libro , the toponyms impressed on the surface of islands of the
Aegean would have triggered recollections of historical events from Greco-
Roman times onward. In addition to the important place-names for the Christian west, Venetians, in particular, would have identified closely with those islands rich with classical ruins under Venice’s maritime control, a testimony, in part, to their own history.
Toponyms bring forward the lack of known origins in new worlds. On
Bordone’s map of Tenochtitlan, the toponyms recall no memory of past events, apart from those recounted in the accompanying textual descriptions, or perhaps other contemporary accounts that circulated in the early sixteenth century. Rather than articulating an important historical past, the toponyms disclose “the mark of a subject of enunciation that names and inventories.”
In this map, toponyms such as Il templo da orare, which designate an architectural structure in the lower quadrant as a site of prayer, reveal Bordone’s own interjections into the ma p to instruct viewers on its unfamiliar figures. By bringing together maps of distant lands, which are far removed from the historical narrative of Europeans, with those of the ancient world, in what Frank Lestringant adeptly describes as
“bricolage,” Bordone’s Libro prompts reflections on differences in origins.
56 Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout
History , ed. Edward H. Dahl, trans. Tom Conley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006),
207.
57
58
Ibid., 212.
Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World, 112.
59
From a general temporal disjunction among the heterogeneous islands of the globe, the juxtaposition of Venice and Tenochtitlan in Bordone’s Libro insists on a particular awareness of the otherness of Tenochtitlan. For Venetians, the last decades of the fifteenth century witnessed growing anxieties about codifying the city’s history of origins. Earlier Venetian historiography had traditionally focused on its early Byzantine roots, which was tied to claims over the body of Saint
Mark.
Yet, the escalation in military confrontations and economic insecurities propelled a reorientation from Venice’s traditional eastward gaze to new preoccupations with the Latin west.
Without forsaking the city’s early Christian roots, Venetians became increasingly interested in fortifying their claims to ancient Roman origins.
The Venetian humanist Bernardo Giustiniani’s De origine urbis venetiarum, which was published posthumously in 1493, is considered by many to be the first historiographic account of Venetian civic origins, tracing the Roman lineage of the first Venetians.
This myth promotes the legendary inception of Venice with the Romans’ foundation of the church of
San Gi acomo in Rialto, reinforcing its ties to an ancient lineage, ties that were fictional.
This version of the legend also claims the divinity of Venice with the belief that the foundation occurred on March 25, 421 CE, the feast of the
Annunciation. Effectively grounding the city in time and space, these legends
59 See Muir, “The Myth of Venice,” in Civic Ritual, 13-61.
60 Brown, Venice & Antiquity, 163.
61 Ibid., 263.
62 Bernardo Giustiniani, De origine urb is Venetiarum rebusque eius ab ipsa ad quadringentesimum usque a nnum gestis historia, Venice 1493, as quoted in Brown, Venice &
Antiquity, 163; Muir, Civic Ritual, 25.
63 Brown, Art and Life, 17.
60
permitted sixteenth-century Venetians to claim a distinctive lineage that boasted origins in both early Christianity and republican Rome.
The city’s urban topography became complicit in rehearsing this history of origins for Venetians.
65
66
67
Elizabeth Crouzet-Pavan suggests, Bordone’s visual interpretation of Venice (fig.
68
69
Bordone also represents Venice as a virgin city, one whose integrity is vigorously
defende d by the manipulation of the Lido’s outer islands into a protective circular border, what becomes, for Patricia Fortini Brown, the imaginary “walls” of the city.
Complementing these borders, and testifying to the city’s impenetrable centre, a ring of churches with visible steeples reiterates the claim of a city whose topography actively defies outside aggression.
64 For lengthier discussions, see Brown, Venice & Antiquity ; and Muir, Civic Ritual.
65 For a study of Venetian prints, see Wilson, The World in Venice.
66 Brown Art and Life, 16-17.
67 Ibid., 16.
68 Crouzet-Pavan, 419.
69 Ibid., 420.
70 Brown, Art and Life, 16.
71 Ibid.
61
of topographical resemblan ces between Venice and Tenochtitlan, “reflecting and rivallin g one another,” as Foucault suggests, blurs the boundaries between original and reflection.
Indeed, through Tenochtitlan’s pairing with Venice,
Bordone’s viewers are urged to consider where Tenochtitlan falls in the order of things; they are confronted, in short, with the possibility that these ‘new worlds’ might be older than their own.
Islands and Christianity
A Christian understanding of the globe fuelled the distinction between the
Europeans’ orbis terrarum and the newly encountered islands in the Atlantic.
Europeans held a Christian worldview, derived from Roman sources, which conceived of a tricontinental globe divided into Asia, Africa, and Europe where each landmass corresponded to a son of Noah responsible for repopulating the earth after its devastation.
Configured around the Mediterranean Sea, with
Jerusalem at its centre, this Christian spatial order consisted of a tricontinental
72 Foucault, The Order of Things, 21.
73 Woodward, “Maps and the Rationalization of Geographic Space" in Circa 1492, 83.
62
world bounded by undifferentiated ocean.
Given visual form in the T-O structure employed in some medieval mappemundi, the orbis terrarum promoted a global understanding that did not account for a fourth landmass in the Atlantic.
The successive encounters with unforeseen lands – America in general and
Tenochtitlan in particular - posed a fundamental epistemological problem for
Christianity.
Indeed, transoceanic exploration, as Frank Lestringant notes, transformed a monolithic world into “a fragmented version of itself.”
As these lands hovered into view, beginning in the fifteenth century, debates ensued over how these lands fit into Europeans’ accepted understandings of the globe.
That these islands in the Atlantic were unknown to the ancients and to early Christians fuelled endless speculation about their origins among scholars.
For some
Europeans, the new worlds’ geographic detachment from the established borders of Christendom also revealed a disjunction in time, as if these news worlds – and their pagan practices – continued to reside in the period of classical antiquity.
Upon Cortés’ arrival in Tenochtitlan, he observes, “Everything has an idol dedicated to it, in the same manner as the pagans who in antiquity honored their gods.” 80 Sustained by European accounts that repeatedly drew comparisons between the pagan activities witnessed in New Spain and those practiced in th e
74 Ibid.
75 For a discussion of the terminology of ‘America’ see Padrón, “The Invention of America and the Invention of the Map,” in The Spacious Word, 1-44.
76 Frank Lestringant, “Utopia and the Reformation” in Utopia: The Search for the Idea
164. l Society,
77 Luca Codi
78 gnola, “The Holy See and the Conversion of the Indians in French and British North
America, 1486-1760,” in America in Eu ropean Consciousness, 197.
For these debates, see Sabine MacCormack “Limits of Understanding: Perceptions of Greco-
Roman and Amerindian Paganism in Early Modern Europe” in America in European
Consciousness, 79-129.
79
80
Ibid., 79.
Cortés, Letters from Mexico, 107.
63
ancient Greco-Roman world, these claims equate the present of the new worlds with the time of antiquity.
Stemming from geographic removal, and sharpened by evidence of paganism, the otherness of these new worlds was attributable, in part, to their placement outside the Christian temporal narrative.
At the end of the fifteenth century, newly encountered islands - as unknown lands were generally perceived - were thought, by the papacy, to be the jurisdiction of the Church.
“In the cultural context of theocratic universalism,” as Denis Cosgrove explains, oceanic explorative enterprises “required papal intervention in order to determine a spatial and anthropological framework for the expanding spaces of Christendom.”
With papal authority waning in Europe, and coming under increased scrutiny prompted by sectarian strife and the rise of
Protestantism, the opening up of horizons by Iberian rulers provided the conditions of possibility for the potential diffusion of Catholicism in these new worlds.
The far-flung islands in new worlds were perceived as potential converts in its global mission. For the Church, Christianity could extend into oceanic space since members were linked together through the ritual of communion.
The papal bulls issued by Pope Alexander XI in the 1490s delineated Portuguese and Spanish sovereignty in the Atlantic, translating
81 MacCormack “Limits of Understanding” in America in European Consciousness, 86; and Kim,
“Uneasy Reflections,” 90. Kim argues that the contapposto stance of the figure at the centre of
Bordone’s map suggests that the place of Tenochtitlan corresponds to the time of paganism in antiquity. He draws on Johanne
(New York:
82 Cosgr s Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object
Columbia University Press, 1983). ove, Apollo’s Eye, 84.
83 Ibid., 83.
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid., 57.
64
undifferentiated oceanic space into a geopolitical territory under European rule.
Reaffirmed, and slightly modified, by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, the islands of the Atlantic were now claimed for the Catholic Church.
These bulls,
Alexander XI’s Inter Certera and his successor Paul III’s Sublimes Deus of 1537, recogni zed the otherness that inhabited the distant islands yet saw within them a potential for conversion.
The papal bulls, then, by claiming the islands as
Europe’s geopolitical domain, were also making a larger declaration about the humanity of these newly encountered peoples and their capability for redemption.
Bordone’s Libro adapts these universalizing claims to Christianity to the
Venetian context. Caught in an increasingly fraught relationship with papal Rome over claims to religious independence, Venice’s self-perception as a sovereign
Christian republic collided with the papacy’s endeavours to consolidate its power.
In the early years of the sixteenth century, Venice was undergoing a process of redefinition that involved a reaffirmation of its claims to divine origins.
91 With its protective ring of churches, Bordone’s map of Venice announces the city as pious. It presents an image of a city “built more by divine
86 Ibid., 84.
87 Ibid., 84; Codignola, “The Holy See and the Conversion of the Indians,” 199.
88 For centuries, christianisation and its implications, would fuel critical debates over the justification of violence and slavery in the Atlantic world. Indians, according to Alexander VI,
“believe that the one God and Creator is in heaven and that the Catholic faith should be embrace and good morals practiced.” For English translation, see W. Eugene Shie d ls, King and Church: The
Rise and Fall of the Patronato Real (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1961), 79, as quoted in
Codignola, “The Holy See and the Conversion of the Indians,” 224n12.
89
90
Ibid., 199.
William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the
Age of the Counter Reformation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), 324.
91 For an overview of these relations during the post-Tridentine years, see Bouwsma, “The
Awakening of Venice,” in Venice and the Defense of Repu blican Liberty, 162-231.
65
than human will.”
In 1493, diarist Marin Sanudo proclaims, “As another writer has said, [Venice’s] name has achieved such dignity and renown that it is fair to say it m ay deservingly be called the ‘Pillar of Italy’ of the races of Christianity
[and] of the Christian nations.”
Venice is cast as a model of Christian virtue to be emulated in the pagan new worlds.
In Bordone’s Libro, Tenochtitlan becomes a synecdoche for a world that can become like Venice – the foremost Christian city – through active processes of conversion, a feat that had already begun in Tenochtitlan in 1524.
While the pairing of Tenochtitlan and Venice in Bordone’s Libro sharpened the temporal and religious differences between the two island cities, an underlying claim to sameness is brought forward through the visual imagery. Bordone’s map of
Tenochtitlan departs from its earlier model, the Cortés map, by amending its topography and effacing discernible references to sacrificial ritual. With its visual imagery now altered to resemble Venice, a city believed to be of divine origins by its citizens, Tenochtitlan is mobilized within representation to make a compelling claim for Christianity. Islands of the new worlds, brought under Europea n geopolitical rule by papal bulls, were now equipped with the powerful weapon of
Christianity to dispel their alterity. Declared capable of redemption, these islands, particularly Tenochtitlan, could be transformed through Christianisation, into a second Venice.
92 Marin Sanudo, De origine, situ et magistratibus urbis Venetae ovvero La cittàdi Venezia (1493-
1530), 20, as quoted in Brown Venice & Antiquity, 263.
93
94
Ibid.
Fernando Cervantes, Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 12.
66
Chapter Three - Re-envisioning Venice: Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s
Navigationi e Viaggi and the ‘Iconic’ View of Tenochtitlan
In a letter dated January 25, 1548, Girolamo Fracastoro acknowledged the recent acquisition of Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s discourse on the Nile flood.
Beginning in 1539, the two Venetians, Fracastoro, a prominent physician, and
Ramusio, the editor of a travel collection, had exchanged ideas about the rising water levels of the Nile.
Their discourse would be widely circulated in the first volume of Ramusio’s Navigationi e Viaggi, an edited anthology of travel accounts of the early modern period.
The collection was first published in 1550, in
Venice, a city built entirely on water where anxieties about irrigation commanded considerable attention. In the sixteenth century, the fraught relationship between land and water was increasingly a cause for strain as the Venetian Republic began to shift away from its traditional maritime-based economy towards an agrarian one on the terrafirma.
In Venice, the need to administer the water levels of the lagoon prompted inquiries into new technologies and, at times, Venetians sought alternatives in other seafaring cities; in short, they looked beyond the lagoon to solve pressing water concerns within.
Like the earlier discourse on the Nile, a similar preoccupation with water characterizes the map of Tenochtitlan that was included in the third volume of
Ramusio’s Navigationi e Viaggi in 1556 (fig. 5).
The map is one of the few
1 George B. Parks, “Ramusio’s Literary History,” Studies in Philology 52 (1955): 147.
2 Parks, “Ramusio’s Literary History,” 146.
3 Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Navigationi e Viaggi, ed. with an introduction by Marica Milanesi, 6
4 vols. (Turin, 1978-88).
Denis Cosgrove, The Palladian Landscape: Geographical Change and its Cultural
Representations in Sixteenth-Century Italy (University Park, PA: Penn State University
Press, 1993), 46-47.
images to emerge in this collection of textual accounts. Ramusio’s image departs from a host of contemporaries, such as Antoine Du Pinet’s Plantz, Pourtraitz et
Descriptions de plusieurs villes et forteresses, tant de l’Europe, Asie, & Afrique, que des Indes et terres neuves (Lyon, 1564) (fig. 9) and Georg Braun and Franz
Hogenberg’s Civitates orbis terrarum (Cologne, 1572) (fig. 10), which employ as a model Benedetto Bordone’s version of 1528 (fig. 4).
Instead, Ramusio’s map is derived from the earlier Cortés map of 1524 (fig. 1).
However, like Bordone, the visual mechanisms in Ramusio’s map encourage viewers, particularly
Venetians, to interpret Tenochtitlan in light of their own city.
Pressed up against the picture plane, on the recto side of a folio, the fullpage map of Tenochtitlan works in specific ways to encourage awareness of the water that penetrates and engulfs the island city. Two separate lakes – one salty and one sweet – are designated by the oversized toponyms, Lago Dolce and Lago
Salso , inscribed on the map’s surface. Tenochtitlan is set at the centre of the salty lake, similar to the Bordone image, though the sweet water is no longer represented as a mere enclave, but is theatricalized through the insertion of multiple islets that float within its contours. Like other authors, Ramusio’s map includes an assortment of place-names and temple designations; however, he departs from earlier images of Tenochtitlan by incorporating lengthy textual inscriptions. What is particularly telling is that these inscriptions are devoted exclusively to articulating the hydraulic contraptions that facilitate or barricade
5 Toussaint, Planos de la Ciudad de México, 94. See also Lestringant, “Venise et L’Archipel:
Quinsay, Mexico, Venezuela,” in Le Livre des Iles, 89-132. For subsequent editions that also include the map, see Mundy, “Mapping the Aztec Capital,” 32.
6 Toussaint, Planos de la Ciudad de México, 94.
68
water circulation in Lake Texcoco. Indeed, a chain of dikes is anchored along the bottom of the salty lake, located directly below the central temple precinct.
Adjacent is written the explanatory phrase aragen e conservan le case dalle onde del lago , suggesting that the system protects the lakeside houses from the waves created in the lake. Similarly, at the junction between the two lakes on the outer shores of Tenochtitlan is inscribed Fonte de l’acqua che entra in la cita, explaining the source from which fresh water is brought into the city centre. Text protrudes into image to foreground concerns about Venice’s own insular topography and its changing relationship to its environing lagoon.
Historiography and Historical Background
Composed in Italian, the three volumes of Ramusio’s Navigationi e Viaggi offer readers a comprehensive view of the world that includes judicious accounts of the French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese explorations. The first volume is dedicated to Africa and the roads to the East. The second volume, on Asia, was only published in 1559, due to an accidental fire in Tomasso Giunti’s printing house and the death of Ramusio in 1557.
Published in 1556, the third volume is generally devoted to the Americas, predominantly to the Spanish initiatives, and is the focus of this chapter. Yet, while Ramusio’s Navigationi e Viaggi is considered one of the first travel anthologies, the collection as a whole has received little scholarly attention. Indeed, it was only in the late-twentieth century
7 For a discussion of the ways the dikes might be derived from a native source, see Mundy,
8
“Mapping the Aztec Capital,” 24.
Skelton, ‘Introduction,” in Navigationi et Viaggi: Venice, 1563-1606 , xii.
69
that it was reprinted in its entirety.
The first reprinted edition, published in 1967, includes an English introduction by R.A. Skelton, outlining biographical information and a historical context for understanding Ramusio’s project. This edition also includes an analysis of contents and sources by George Parks. In an earlier study, Parks also traces Ramusio’s literary history to suggest that, until the later years of his life, Ramusio had little intention of preparing a compilation of travel narratives for publication (1955).
Although various travel accounts included in Navigationi e Viaggi have been translated individually, Ramusio’s volumes have yet to appear in English. However, recent scholarship, such as
Natalie Zemon Davis’s study of Leo Africanus, has engaged critically with individual narratives as they appear in Ramusio’s text (2006).
Important general scholarly contributions also include Marica Milanesi’s extensive introduction to a later reprinted edition (1978) and Massimo Donattini’s biographical study of
Ramusio (1980).
More recently, Sylvaine Albertan-Coppola and Marie-
Christine Gomez-Géraud’s article traces the paratextual mechanisms at work to suggest how they work to organize Ramusio’s collection (1990).
This chapter takes as its departure point the map of Tenochtitlan in
Ramusio’s third volume to consider the ways that Tenochtitlan, as it manifests in print, compelled Europeans to rethink their own their geographies. The repetition
9 George Bruner Parks, The Contents and Sources of Ramusio’s ‘Navigationi.’ (New York: New
York Public Library, 1955), 8. In 1837, only Ramusio’s first volume was reprinted.
10
11
Parks, “Ramusio’s Literary History.”
Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (New
York: Hill and Wang, 2006).
12 Milanesi, “Introduzione” in Navigationi e Viaggi; Massimo Donattini, “Giovanni Battista
Ramusio e le sue ‘Navigationi’ appunti per una biografia,” Critica Storica 17 (1980): 56-100.
13 Sylvaine Albertan-Coppola and Marie-Christine Gomez-Géraud, “La Collection des
‘Navigationi et Viaggi’ (1550-1559) de Giovanni-Battista Ramusio: Mécanismes et Projets
S’Après les Para-textes,” Revue des Etudes Italiennes 36, no. 1-4 (1990): 59-70.
70
of images, derived from a single prototype, forged an image of a place whose insular topography resonated with imaginative possibilities. Represented along ideal city lines, Tenochtitlan’s urban form came to be envisaged as a model, one to be emulated by Europeans, in general, and Venetians, in particular. Beginning with a description of Ramusio’s project, I consider how the map of Tenochtitlan is working in relation to the multiple strands of text that engulf it, and how, relying on the work of Louis Marin, these strategies can be seen as utopic. In the sixteenth century, utopic interests, prompted, in part, by geographic discoveries, triggered speculation about unforeseen worlds and new possibilities for existing ones. Utopia, as Marina Leslie aptly notes, “has never been located twice in the same place.”
It reveals itself in diverse forms according to the desires of individual societies.
Tenochtitlan’s urban topography, specifically its relationship to its environing waters, opened up new possibilities for re-imagining Venice’s own lagoonal setting. The Republic’s progressive shift from a maritime economy in the eastern Mediterranean to a land-based economy on the mainland fuelled debates over water management and the future of the lagoon.
These debates crystallized at mid-century in the unrealized proposals for the Bacino of San
Marco put forward by Alvise Cornaro and Cristoforo Sabbadino. While Manfredo
Tafuri has effectively argued that Tenochtitlan played a vital role in reenvisioning the Bacino, what is particularly striking is that Tenochtitlan, the city
14 Marina Leslie, Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History (Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 1998), 25.
15 Cosgrove, The Palladian Landscape, 46-48, 139-166.
71
to be emulated, is not one that exists in the real.
Instead, it is the image of
Tenochtitlan construed first in the original Cortés map of 1524 and repeatedly authenticated in its multiple derivatives that comes to inspire sixteenth-century
Venetians.
In Venice, Ramusio was an active participant in a community of scholars that included Girolamo Fracastoro, Andrea Navagero, and Pietro Bembo with whom he exchanged knowledge about geography, among other subjects.
Ramusio was born in Treviso in 1485 and studied at the University of Padua where he allegedly met Fracastoro and Navagero, who would later serve as the
Venetian ambassador to Spain from 1525-28.
In 1505, at twenty years old,
Ramusio began his tenure with the Venetian government as a clerk in the
Chancellery where he remained for ten years. From 1505 until 1507, Ramusio served as secretary to Alvise Mocenigo, the Venetian envoy to France, whom he accompanied during his travels to Tours, Blois, and Paris. In 1515, Ramusio was named secretary to the Venetian Senate, a post he held until 1533; from 1533 until his death in 1557, Ramusio was secretary to the Council of Ten.
Like other humanists, the knowledge of the ancient geographers provided an important departure point for Ramusio in constructing a new image of the world, a world whose contours were rapidly changing in the age of exploration.
Ramusio’s Navigationi e Viaggi appeared in various editions between 1550 and
16 Manfredo Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, trans. Jessica Levine (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1989).
17
18
19
Parks, “Ramusio’s Literary History,” 132.
Skelton, ‘Introduction,” in Navigationi et Viaggi: Venice, 1563-1606 , vi.
20
Parks, “Ramusio’s Literary History,” 129.
Skelton, ‘Introduction,” in Navigationi et Viaggi: Venice, 1563-1606 , vi.
72
1613.
In the beginning of the first volume , the author declares his intentions to expand on the understandings of the ancients by bringing forward recent travel accounts of unforeseen lands. He writes, “Seeing and considering that the maps of
Ptolemy’s Geographia describing Africa and India were very imperfect in respect of the great knowledge that we have of those regions, I thought it proper and perhaps not a little useful to bring together the narrations of writers of our day who have been in the aforesaid parts of the world and spoken of them in detail, so that, supplementing them from the description in the Portuguese nautical charts, other maps could be made to give the greatest satisfaction to those who take pleasure in such knowledge.”
Throughout the sixteenth century, all travel narratives published in Europe were to employ a vernacular language, fuelled, in part, by the growing interest in travel literature among wider publics.
Navigationi e Viaggi: Text, Image, and Memory
Ramusio’s collection was a systematic compilation of travel accounts that, although published in Italian, was intended to contribute to pan-European interests in the intersections between empirical understanding and humanist learning.
He classified the documents in his collection into three parts, which appear in three distinct volumes, though he departs from the tricontinental organization of the world derived from classical antiquity. Assembled together in
21 Parks, Contents, 7. The first volume was published in six editions 1550, 1554, 1563, 1606, and
1613; the second volume was published after Ramusio’s death, in four editions 1559, 1574, 1583,
1606; and the third volume was printed in three editions 1556, 1565, and 1606.
22 English translation in Skelton, ‘Introduction,” in Navigationi et Viaggi: Venice, 1563-1606 , vii.
23 Skelton, ‘Introduction,” in Navigationi et Viaggi: Venice, 1563-1606 , xi.
24 Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Travel Writing as a Genre: Facts, Fiction and the Invention of a Scientific
Discourse in Early Modern Europe,” Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel
Writing 1, no.1-2 (2000): 7.
73
different volumes, the various experiential accounts of these unknown worlds, which often varied in style and length, were largely left intact with little intervention by the editor.
As Frank Lestringant suggests, the “all-powerful subjectivity” held by sixteenth-century cosmographers, who often incorporated firsthand accounts into their own narratives, was unravelled in edited collections, such as Ramusio’s Navigationi e Viaggi.
Travellers were thus left to report their adventures for themselves. In his collection, Ramusio reveals the source of the text, its original language, and, when relevant, the source from which it was translated, and the degree of editorial involvement. His authorial interjections range from introductory remarks to full commentaries.
The third volume is replete with background information to situate the unfolding narratives, while longer commentaries emerge in the first volume and, to an extent, in the second with Marco Polo.
The most extensive interjections offered by Ramusio tend to address geographical matters, such as the total habitability of the earth,
Magellan’s circumnavigation, the spice trade and, particularly, the reasons for the flooding of the Nile.
The procurement and translation of diverse narratives forged a compilation of overlapping perspectives that provided readers with multiple observation points at which to scrutinize new worlds. The third volume of
25 Frank Lestringant, “The Crisis of Cosmography at the End of the Renaissance,” in Humanism in
Crisis: The Decline of the French Renaissance, ed. Philippe Desan (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1991) 174.
26
27
Ibid.
28
29
Skelton, ‘Introduction,” in Navigationi et Viaggi: Venice, 1563-1606 , xi.
Ibid., xii.
Ibid. For a discussion of the total habitability of the earth, see John M. Headley, “The Sixteenth-
Century Venetian Celebration of the Earth’s Total Habitability: The Issue of the Fully Habitable
World for Renaissance Europe,” Journal of World History 8, no.1 (1997): 1-27.
74
Ramusio’s Navigationi e Viaggi is dedicated primarily to eyewitness accounts of the Spanish Americas; however, it also incorporates accounts of French voyages, such as Jacques Cartier’s explorations of modern-day Canada and an anonymous
French mariner’s travels to Brazil, Madagascar and Sumatra.
Following
Ramusio’s opening Discorzo Sopra Il Terzo Volume is a dedication to Fracastoro, which appears in different forms in all three volumes. The first narrative is Peter
Martyr of Anghiera’s De Novo Orbe Decades, whose translation was begun by
Andrea Navagero during his tenure in Spain. When Navagero passed away in
1529, Ramusio was charged with its completion.
In his collection, Ramusio included the four decades that report on Spanish explorations from Columbus to
Balboa until 1519.
Following Peter Martyr’s text is the work of Gonzalo
Fernando d’Oviedo, the Spanish historian of natural history, whose Sommario
Della Naturale et Generale Historia delle’Indie Occidentali was first printed in
Venice in 1534. Also included is the first part of Oviedo’s official history titled
Delle Generale et Naturale Historia Delle Indie .
Following these monumental works, the reader is submerged in the accounts of Hernán Cortés that relate his arrival, conflict, and conquest of
Tenochtitlan. In 1524, Nicolo Liburnio had translated Cortés’ Second Letter into
Italian, from the Latin edition, to accompany the Cortés map of Tenochtitlan.
However, Ramusio’s translation is instead derived from the Seville edition of
30 Parks, Contents , 38-39.
31 Parks, “Ramusio’s Literary History,” 132-33.
32 Parks, Contents , 31.
33 Ibid., 32.
34 Ibid. See also A.R. Pagden, ‘Translator’s Introduction,’ in Hernan Cortés, Letters from Mexico, xi.
75
1522. The same is true for the third letter that had also been translated and published by Liburnio.
The fourth letter was reproduced from a Spanish version printed in Toledo in 1525.
In addition to the Cortés letters, a variety of sources recount the expeditions to northern Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, California and
Florida.
More importantly, however, is the captivating text, which appears for the first time in Ramusio’s third volume, titled Relatione di Alcune Cose della
Nuova Spagna, & della gran città di Temestitan Messico.
The text is authored by an anonymous source that claims to have travelled alongside Cortés during his expeditions in Mexico.
Divided into multiple subtitled sections, the text describes the social practices of the Aztecs such as marriage rituals, costume, and geography, with an interest in the island city of Tenochtitlan. It is at this junction towards the end of the anonymous narrative that the city reveals itself in graphic form. Intervening into the flow of text, the map of Tenochtitlan (fig. 5) is juxtaposed with descriptions that solicit awareness of various components of the city’s geography, such as “Delle gran città di Temistitan Messico,” “Le strade che vi sono,” “Le piazze & i mercati,” and “De i templi & meschite che havevano .
”
By drawing attention to specific aspects of Tenochtitlan, these manifestations of text, like the Cortés letters, organize how the city should be experienced.
35 Parks, Contents , 32.
36 Parks, Contents , 33. For a discussion of the missing fifth letter, see Pagden, ‘Translator’s
Introduction,’ 1xiii-1xvii.
37
38
Parks, Contents , 31-41.
Narrative of some things of New Spain and of the great city of Temestitan Mexico, written by the
Anonymous Conqueror, a companion of Hernan Cortés, trans. by Marshall H. Saville (New York:
New York Cortés Society, 1917).
39 Parks, Contents , 33-34.
76
Precipitated by the opening up of horizons, the multiple eyewitness accounts in Ramusio’s collection recount separate journeys, each impressed with the subjectivities of individual authors. The “gaze of the traveler” aligns with that of the reader; as narrators move through unforeseen spaces, Europeans are slowly made aware of their activities.
The progression through different viewing positions, as Louis Marin suggests, binds them together to bestow an order on the enterprise.
The reader is not presented with the narrative all at once, but embarks on a journey alongside the narrator where things, events, and peoples unfold over a period of time. For Marin, then, inherent to narrative is a moving process of revealing and concealing.
The temporality of text moves the narrative forward, successively unveiling the present, and proposing a linear migration through a chronology of events. As Marin observes, only through the enunciation of the narrator do events “presence” for readers.
When read in isolation, these travel accounts unfold as single narratives, tracing individual movements through space. They offer readers an exclusive viewpoint, that of the narrator, from which to experience the world. However, when read in conjunction with the map of Tenochtitlan, particularly those narratives that unfold within the city itself, the texts organize the ways viewers gain access to Tenochtitlan. Arranged spatially around the map, these accounts translate into a host of vantage points at which to contemplate the city. In
Ramusio’s map, viewers are lifted to an elevated vantage point, to a place outside
40 Louis Marin, “The City in Its Map and Portrait,” in On Representation, 207-208.
41 Ibid.
42 Louis Marin, Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces , trans. Robert A. Vollrath
(Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990), 202.
43 Ibid.
77
the image, where the “system of itineraries” through Tenochtitlan can be imagined.
The absence of a single viewpoint, attributed to the diverse perspectives offered by the texts, suggests that Tenochtitlan is visible from
“everywhere and nowhere,” a state that Marin defines as utopic.
The utopic, then, appears in the coexistence of its parts.
When these narratives are read with the image, viewers experience a multitude of vantage points that “play off one another,” as Marin suggests, but can never be brought together.
When text and image are interpreted together, Ramusio’s map of
Tenochtitlan becomes fused with a temporal dimension that it is otherwise denied.
Through the temporality of text, specifically Cortés’ three letters, readers are led through various episodes in the conquest of Tenochtitlan. Revealed are overlapping itineraries at different historical moments that record and document the transition of the city from the pre-conquest reign of Moctezcuma to the city under Spanish colonial rule. The narratives that accompany both the original
Cortés map of Tenochtitlan and Bordone’s later version are derived from the
Second Letter, which only recounts the conquistador’s adventures before the fall of Tenochtitlan to the Spaniards.
On the other hand, Ramusio’s inclusion of multiple texts, particularly the third and fourth letters and the anonymous conqueror’s text, creates a visible disunity between text and image. Readers are guided through the topographical changes in Tenochtitlan that come with the arrival of the Spanish. As Cortés’ Third Letter reveals, Tenochtitlan’s urban form
44 Ibid.,, 207.
45 Marin, “The City in Its Map and Portrait,” 207.
46 Ibid.
47 Marin, Utopics, 208.
48 For a reproduction of the Second Letter, see Cortés, Letters from Mexico.
78
was significantly modified during the conquest, “[…] considering that Temixtitan itself had once been so renowned and of such importance, we decided to settle in it and also to rebuild it, for it was completely destroyed…”
On the ruins of
Tenochtitlan, the Spanish erected their own European capital with the stones of the demolished Aztec temples.
They preserved little more than the city’s radial streets and causeways because of the importance attributed to well-organized cities in sixteenth-century Europe.
While the narrative moves readers forward through historical events, journeying through time, the spatial representation reveals an image of the past.
Tenochtitlan had radically changed over the almost thirty-five years under
Spanish control, yet the image of Tenochtitlan, as it appeared in 1524, continued to emerge in Europe in slightly modified form. Set at the centre of the lake, and connected to the mainland by outstretching causeways, this image propagates the
“iconic” view of Tenochtitlan, one derived from its Nuremberg prototype (fig. 1), instilling it with authority through repetition.
Intriguingly, the only allusion to the passage of time on the map is, once again, textual. Where “Tenochtitlan” had previously signalled the represented city on the walls of the temple precinct,
“Mexico” – whose semantics were indicative of a Spanish presence - was now inscribed. In 1556, when Ramusio’s third volume was initially published, the map of Tenochtitlan (fig. 5) depicted a place in the new world that would have been barely recognizable.
49 Ibid.
, 270.
50 Kagan, Urban Images, 91.
51 On repetition see Marin, “The City in Its Map and Portrait,” 211.
79
Ramusio’s map represents a place where image and the real have been torn apart, dislocating the sign from its meaning, and permitting the image now to function in different ways. The map is no longer about the specificity of place.
Instead, it becomes, for Europeans, what Pierre Nora might describe as a lieu de mémoire, a site that embodies memory that is at once closed in on itself, yet malleable to multiple meanings.
In sixteenth-century Venice, as citizens were re-envisioning their city, they looked to Ramusio’s map of Tenochtitlan with a concerted interest in water management. The image presented Venetians with an alternative to their current predicament. Situated in a remote location, outside the flow of time, Ramusio’s map conjured a place where spatial play of the imagination could be realized. This image of Tenochtitlan’s past thus becomes a site for re-envisioning a Venetian future.
Utopian Interests
In the sixteenth century, renewed interest in ideal societies is attributable, in part, to the publication of Thomas More’s Libellus vere aureus nec minus salutaris quam festivus de optimo reipublicae statu deque nova insula Utopia .
More’s Utopia subsequently triggered a wealth of utopian texts including Francis
Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1627) and Tomasso Campanella’s The City of the Sun
(1637). First published in 1516, Utopia played on the Greek topos, which signified place, to designate a no-place. The story unfolds over two books; the first is a critique of the grave social problems that plagued England, while the
52 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26
(1989): 24.
80
second proposes the far-flung island of Utopia, conceived as an ideal society, as an appealing alternative.
Utopia offered early modern individuals new ways of envisaging their societies when various communities throughout sixteenth-century Europe were plagued with social anxieties sharpened by mounting religious and political divisions.
While utopia was primarily about social organization, it placed considerable emphasis on the role of physical environments in enforcing social order. Indeed, in Utopia, More thoroughly describes 54 nearly uniform towns constructed in an orderly spatial arrangement. In this respect, utopia as a literary genre intersected with the ideal city discourse, primarily an Italian phenomenon, which emerged in the late-fifteenth century.
As Ruth Eaton suggests, “the majority of utopian societies are imagined as residing in urban environments, the cities themselves indicating humankind’s domination of the forces of nature, their frequently geometrical layouts subliminally conveying the rational design that regulates their social and political organization.”
In ideal cities, like utopian societies, human intellect intervenes to rationalize natural environments. While its origins were rooted in antiquity and the medieval period, architects of the
Quattrocento, such as Antonio Averlino, known as Filarete, articulated the principles of the ideal city, designing schemes along these lines.
In his Trattato
53 For an overview, see Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian T hought in the Western
World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1979).
54 For specific examples, see Ruth Eaton, “Idealization of the City from the Renaissance
Onwards,” in Ideal Cities, 38-71.
55 Ruth Eaton, “The City as Intellectual Exercise,” in Utopia: the Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World , eds. Roland Schaer, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent (New
York: The New York Public Library: Oxford University Press, 2000), 119.
56 Eaton, Ideal Cities, 50.
81
di Architettura, written between 1457-64, Filarete’s Sforzinda, named in honour of his patron Francesco Sforza, is set in a radial plan.
Leon Battista Alberti claimed that a city’s nobility resided in its architecture. Articulating the importance of order, Alberti writes, “For without order there can be nothing commodious, graceful and noble.”
Utopia conceptualized future possibilities in urban settings, ones that could be realized by human intervention.
Early modern utopias were often connected to the liminality of islands and the discoveries of unforeseen worlds. Shifting geographies opened up vast spaces replete with islands that offered themselves up to Europeans’ imagination and desire. In the age of discovery, as John Gillies explains, “Utopias were entirely in the realm of possibility, even probability.”
Utopias resided on the periphery of the known world and were accessible only through the imagination. Thomas More had conceived of Utopia as an island, one whose exact location remained concealed from readers though it was believed to reside in the Atlantic world, an assumption due, in part, to the narrator’s credentials. In More’s book, Raphael
Hythlodaeus, who claimed to have travelled with Amerigo Vespucci on three of his voyages, is charged with describing Utopia to early modern readers.
Travelling to utopia detaches readers from familiar environments to transport them into the realm of another world, one that bears some resemblance to the world they just left.
The distance drawn between the point of origin and utopia, which was often envisaged as an island, shifts an individual’s perspective
57 Ibid.
58 Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art if Building in Ten Books, trans. J. Rykwert, N. Leach and R.
Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 191, as quoted in Eaton, Ideal Cities, 49.
59
60
Gillis, Islands of the Mind, 75.
Ibid., 78.
82
to an exterior viewpoint. As Roland Greene conceives it, while islands permitted the free play of the imagination, they also play an important role in permitting viewers a different perspective of Europe. That is, islands, believed to be strung along the horizon of the known world, offered viewers an oblique perspective at the margins at which to scrutinize the centre.
For Venetians in particular,
Ramusio’s map of Tenochtitlan, like Bordone’s, revealed a city that, although removed in space, clearly resembled their own. Through their visual experience of the image, Venetians would be transported to an external vantage point, one located outside the lagoon in the abyss of new worlds.
Venice and the Lagoon
In the sixteenth century, Venice was forced to re-evaluate its longstanding relationship with its lagoonal setting. The city was inextricably linked to its environing waters whose protection was vital to evading flood, siltation, and the harbouring of disease.
The combination of wind and tides had created lidi, or earthy banks, forming a number of channels and barriers that permitted seawater to infiltrate the lagoon twice a day.
As anxieties about water management escalated in Venice, the state brought a number of informal committees under centralized control. The Savi ed Esecutori alle Acque, the water magistracy founded in 1501, was charged with increasing the resistance of the lidi against the powerful surges in the Adriatic with stone breakwaters to combat the risk of
61 Roland Greene, “Island Logic,” in ‘ The Tempest’ and Its Travels, eds. Peter Hulme and William
H. Sherman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 141.
62 Denis Cosgrove, “Platonism and Practicality: Hydrology, Engineering and Landscape in
Sixteenth-Century Venice,” in Water, Engineering and Landscape. Water Control and Landscape
Transformation in the Modern Period, eds. Denis Cosgrove and Geoff Petts (London and New
York: Belhaven Press, 1990), 35.
63 Ibid., 36-37.
83
flood.
Another prime concern was the regulation of fluvial waters that originated mostly in the Alps and threatened to penetrate the lagoon.
Diversion of these rivers away from the lagoon urgently called for drainage and irrigation projects that would stabilize the resulting shifts in water levels on the terrafirma.
In 1556, the Magistratura sopra i Beni Inculti, a committee composed of three members of Venice’s patrician class, was made responsible for regulating agricultural resources on the mainland.
Venice’s reorientation towards the west and its shift to an agriculturalbased economy on the terrafirma in the sixteenth century was prompted, in part, by mounting pressure from external sources.
Trade relations with the east, which had traditionally driven Venice’s maritime economy, suffered the repercussions of the gradual loss of control of the Aegean, triggered by the fall of
Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. The Spanish and Portuguese explorations in the Atlantic unravelled Venetian control of the spice trade and the Republic’s defeat at the Battle of Agnadello to the League of Cambrai resulted in the loss of important mainland territories, though most were regained by 1517.
Venetian patricians who had made their wealth as merchants now preferred land investments on the terrafirma, which were perceived as a safer alternative in view of Ottoman advances in the Aegean.
These ventures onto the terrafirma became increasingly linked to aristocratic lifestyles where displays of wealth would not be
64 Ibid., 37.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid., 37-38.
67 Cosgrove, The Palladian Landscape, 139-142.
68 Ibid., 35.
69 Ibid., 33.
70 Ibid., 47.
84
mitigated by sumptuary legislation.
In Venice, private opulence was strongly discouraged since it was believed to endanger the stability of the Republic.
The patricians’ newfound relationship with the terrafirma, and increasing ties to its lands, precipitated interests in land reclamation and irrigation initiatives.
Various proposals to monitor water flows in the Venetian lagoon involved changes to the city’s physical geography, which, undoubtedly, generated concern among Venetians who believed the city’s unique beginnings to be rooted in its urban form. Venice’s myth of origins, articulated in Gasparo Contarini’s De magistratibus et republica Ventorum (1543), linked to the city’s geographic setting at the centre of the lagoon to its sacred foundations and ideal republican institutions.
Not only was the lagoon perceived as fundamental to Venice’s maritime interests, and the economic welfare of the state, but it also functioned as a formidable guardian against invasion. Describing Venice’s secluded location in the lagoon, Marin Sanudo writes, “[Venice] has no surrounding walls, no gates which are locked at night…[yet] it is so very safe at present, that no one can attack or frighten it.”
For individuals who believed Venice to be built by God’s
71 Ibid., 49.
72 For a study of the domestic interiors of Venetian patrician households, see Patricia Fortini
Brown, “Behind the Walls: The Material Culture of Venetian Elites,” in Venice Reconsidered: The
History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297-1797, eds. John Martin and Dennis Romano
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
73 Salvatore Ciriacono, Building on Water: Venice, Holland and the Construction of the European
Landscape in Early Modern Times, trans. Jeremy Scott (New York: Berghahn, 2006), 33.
74 On Gasparo Contarini, see Elizabeth G. Gleason, Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome, and
Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty, 144-53 .
75 Marin Sanudo, “Praise of the City of Venice, 1493” in Venice: A Documentary History, 1450-
1630, eds. David Chambers and Brian Pullan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press with the
Renaissance Society of America, 2001), 4.
85
will, as the myth claimed, human interference in its natural environment raised pressing moral questions.
With patrician economic interests deeply rooted in land investments outside the city, in the terrafirma, concerns exterior to Venice became increasingly incorporated into debates within the city.
These debates oscillated between concerns for the lagoon, a defining characteristic of Venice, and agricultural interests and the fertility of lands on the terrafirma.
They often pitted the interests of the Venetian state against those of private individuals, thereby striking at the heart of Venetian republican ideology in which the individual was part of the state as a whole. The debates crystallized at midcentury in the dispute between Alvise Cornaro and Cristoforo Sabbidino. Cornaro, a patrician originally from Padua who had reclaimed land for construction on the terrafirma, proposed an elaborate plan that would drastically transform the topography of Venice. Sabbadino, on the other hand, an employee of the Venetian state, proposed a plan that was more in line with Venice’s self-image, one that did not implement aggressive changes to its urbanscape. The conflict, as Manfredo
Tafuri suggests, stems from “two different conceptions of territorial equilibrium, two different visions of the relationship between technical choices and political choices, and two types of economic interests.”
76 Cosgrove, The Palladian Landscape, 161.
77 Ibid., 35.
78 Ibid.
79 Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, 140. For a literature review of the debates, see 258n3.
86
Perspectival Shifts: Re-imagining the Bacino of San Marco
The projects for the Bacino reversed the perspective on the traditional view of Venice - the image of the Doge’s Palace and Saint Mark’s basilica from the water – which was often seen by travelers upon their arrival to the city.
Shifting the gaze away from Venice’s political centre, which was undergoing substantial modifications with the construction of Jacopo Sansovino’s Library
(1537-91) and the Loggetta (1537-45), the projects, instead, thrust the gaze outward towards the water.
From a position in the city centre, the encroaching lagoon would be framed by the two columns of justice mounted with representations of the city’s protectors, Saint Theodore and Saint Mark, at the southern end of the Piazzetta.
The projects compelled Venetians to look out at the Bacino, throwing into relief the struggles between conflicting ideologies over the future of the lagoon.
Cornaro and Sabbadino proposed radically different ways of intervening into the waters of Venice. Sabbadino, named Proto alle acque in 1542, conjured images of a healthier Venice by drawing on its celebrated myth to create a distinction between the present state of the lagoon and its legendary past.
He blamed its deteriorative condition on misdirected endeavours that privileged
80 Muir and Weissman, “Social and Symbolic Places” in The Power of Place, 86.
81 This is particularly true with regards to Cornaro’s ornamental scheme for the basin. See Tafuri,
Venice and the Renaissance, 153.
82 Nicola Ivanhoff, “La Libreria Marciana: Arte e Iconologia,” Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte
6 (1968): 38 as quoted in Eugene J. Johnson “Jacopo Sansovino, Giacomo Torelli, and the
Theatricality of the Piazza in Venice,” The Journal for the Society of Architectural Historians 59, no. 4 (2000): 436.
83 Cornaro, Antichi scrittori d’idraulica veneta. Scritture sulla laguna, 109, as quoted in
Ciriacono, Building on Water, 111.
87
private economic gain over the welfare of the lagoon.
Sabbadino was critical of individuals who preferred “the profit one might get from wheat [over] the conservation of the lagoon, which is the fortress of Venice.”
Sabbadino’s conservative approach to the lagoon was indicative of the close ties that bound history and politics with Venice’s geography.
In 1557, Sabbadino proposed a plan for the lagoon that maintained, for the most part, the Venetian urbanscape intact. For Sabbadino, as Tafuri suggests, technology was to “preserve and then renew” by emphasizing natural processes.
It was to participate in a restoration of the lagoon that would simultaneously cleanse its waters and generate reclaimable lands for property development.
To increase circulation, Venetian canals would be connected to canals along the
Fondamente Nuova, to the north, and along the Giudecca, to the south, while an additional waterway would travel along the coast.
Sabbadino’s program also inscribed Venice in space; it drew distinguishable boundaries between land and sea with a fondamenta, an embankment, which wrapped around the city to demarcate it from the lagoon.
While the fondamenta would extend the boundaries of the city, the additional land was to be reclaimed either for
84 Discorsi de il Sabbattino per la laguna di Venetia,’ in Sabbadino, Antichi scrittori d’idraulica veneta. Discorsi sopra la laguna , II, part I, R. Cessi , ed., (Venice, 1930). 29, as quoted in
Ciriacono, Building on Water, 111.
85
86
SEA, filza 85, 11 January 1550, as quoted in Ciriacono, Building on Water, 42.
87
88
Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, 141.
Ibid., 142.
89
Ibid., 184.
Ennio Concina, A History of Venetian Architecture, trans. Judith Landry (Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 210.
88
construction, or for the installation of three artificial basins that would collect the excessive flow of water from the terrafirma.
Unlike Sabbadino, Cornaro’s plan veiled technological innovations in spectacle, proposing to fundamentally transform the Bacino directly in front of the political centre of Venice.
It posed a decisive challenge to Venice’s relationship with its lagoonal setting, which had traditionally advocated for continuity.
Cornaro’s proposition included the construction of three devices: a fountain in
San Marco with water from the Brenta and Sile rivers and, in the Bacino, a small island built on a hill, and a Roman theatre where performances could be held.
Composed in a triangular formation with the fountain in San Marco, the hill and the theatre would be positioned along two channels, to avoid disruption of the lagoon, while easing along natural processes.
In conjunction with this impressive scheme, Cornaro proposed walls, constructed on embankments in the lagoon, which would close Venice in on itself, barring all entries to the city with the exception of the Lido.
While the walls were congruent with ideal city principles, as articulated by Leon Battista Alberti who claims the “nakedness” of a city without walls, they violated Venice longstanding assumption that the lagoon alone safeguarded the city against outsiders.
Encompassing Venice at its centre, the embankments erected in the lagoon would drastically alter the physical
90 Ibid.
91 Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, 142-43.
92 See Cosgrove, The Palladian Landscape, 163; and Tafuri 145.
93 Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, 153-54.
94 Ibid., 151.
95 Leon Battista Alberti, Ten Books on Architecture, ed. Joseph Rykwert (London, 1995), bk. IV, ch. Iii, 72, as quoted in Richard L. Kagan, “A World Without Walls: City and Town in Colonial
Spanish America,” in City Walls: The Urban Enceinte in Global Perspective, ed. James D. Tracy
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
89
form of the city; they would force upon Venice the circular plan that characterized most ideal cities.
Connected to the proposed enclosure of Venice within embankments was a plan to separate fresh and salt waters; in short, Venice would now be set in a fresh water basin within the city’s walls, while the salt water flowed outside.
For Cornaro, this scheme would protect newly reclaimed territories from forceful tidal waters, a contentious point with Sabbadino who claimed that Venice required these movements to clean its waterways.
Through the rationalization of the Bacino, driven by human interference, Venice was reimagined in utopic terms.
What is particularly telling is how Tenochtitlan becomes implicated in the debates over the Bacino. As water management increasingly became a cause for concern in the sixteenth century, Venetians, principally in humanist circles, looked beyond the lagoon for solutions. As I suggested at the beginning of the chapter, Ramusio’s map of Tenochtitlan brings forward anxieties in Venice about the encroaching lagoon. The toponyms instruct viewers on how the waterworks in
Tenochtitlan, as they are represented on the map, efficiently control the flow of water. While Venetians were undoubtedly interested in Tenochtitlan’s innovative irrigation system, they were also drawn to the city’s unique topographical setting.
Tenochtitlan in its “iconic form,” as Marin conceives it, came to be understood as an ideal city, one whose circular shape set in the middle of a lake was surely to be
96 Cosgrove, The Palladian Landscape, 41. For a discussion of ideal city plans in sixteenthcentury Europe, see Eaton, Ideal Cities, 38-71.
97
98
Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, 152.
Ciriacono, Building on Water, 114.
90
emulated.
The repetition of images of Tenochtitlan, derived from a single prototype, impressed Europeans with an idea of a place, one far removed from the reality of Mexico City. Despite the monumental changes to Tenochtitlan’s physical geography, changes that became perceptible in textual accounts but were silenced in graphic representations, the city’s singular appearance came to possess an imaginative resonance for Europeans.
Alvise Cornaro’s connection to humanist circles in Venice, and essentially his proposal for the Bacino, is indicative of the ways that Tenochtitlan came to inspire Venetians to rethink their city’s urban layout. As Tafuri suggests,
Cornaro’s plan to isolate Venice within newly constructed walls in the lagoon can be attributed to his correspondence with Girolamo Fracastoro.
In a letter to
Cornaro, Fracastoro draws a striking comparison between Venice and the distant city in the new world; he envisions Venice, set in a fresh water lake, as a counterpart to the great city of Tenochtitlan.
Although officials rejected
Cornaro’s plan for the Bacino, that Venice was re-imagined as Tenochtitlan, a city whose own canals were increasingly filled to supply land for the expanding colonial city, testifies to the authority of the image that was fuelled by print throughout the century.
99 Marin, “The City in Its Map and Portrait,” 211.
100 For a discussion of the ways maps are silent, see Harley, “Silences and Secrecy.”
101 Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, 152-53. Fracastoro probably draws on his knowledge of
Tenochtitlan, acquired, in part, through his association with Ramusio, Navagero, Bembo, among others, with whom he gathered to discuss geographical matters.
“E cosi ridur vinegia un’altra voltra in laguna, ma laguna di acque dolce, come e themistitan.”
See Lettera di Girolamo Fracastoro sulle lagune di Venezie, ora per la prima volta pubblicata ed illustrata (Venezia, Tipografia di Alvisopoli, 1815), 10. See also Tafuri, Venice and the
Renaissance, 152.
103 Kagan, Urban Images, 91.
91
Working in tandem with the multiple derivatives of the original Cortés map (fig. 1), Ramusio’s map of Tenochtitlan (fig. 5) forged an image of a place that oscillated between the real and the fictive. The map transports viewers to the remote city among new worlds, compelling them to consider Venice from a different perspective – a point outside, perhaps utopic - from which could be envisaged new possibilities. As the textual inscriptions on Ramusio’s map suggest, humanists in Venice were intent on scrutinizing the waterworks in other cities for inventive solutions, particularly in Tenochtitlan, whose urban topography mirrored their own. The visual experience of Tenochtitlan offered
Venetians a means with which to reflect on their own geography, a geography whose complicated relationship to history was brought forward during the debates over the lagoon. Tenochtitlan, as it appeared in print, effectively displaced the real city it claimed to represent. As Alvise Cornaro’s proposal demonstrates, it was the image of Tenochtitlan that served as a basis for re-imagining Venice in utopic terms.
Venice, a city whose mythic origins were deeply rooted in its urban form, was re-envisioned as an island city in the vastness of the Atlantic. In
Venice, the cumulative effect of printed images of Tenochtitlan almost resulted in concrete structural changes. Indeed, the “iconic” view of Tenochtitlan, set in the centre of a lake, was nearly permanently inscribed in the Venetian landscape.
104 Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, 152.
92
Conclusion
For nearly two hundred years, the Cortés map of 1524 evoked an idea of
Tenochtitlan that was authenticated in Europe through its diverse replications in print. In these duplicative processes, the authority of Tenochtitlan, as it appears in the archetypal Cortés map, was constantly reiterated, fortifying an image of a place in the minds of Europeans. While the original Cortés map undoubtedly drew on European spatial conventions and the ideal city discourse, it also, notably, inscribed the city in temporal and spatial narratives, announcing Tenochtitlan as a place that, with the arrival of the Spanish, no longer existed. Later sixteenthcentury derivatives, however, worked in different ways. In the works of Bordone and Ramusio, the images appear less concerned with conjuring a sense of
Tenochtitlan, that is, attending to the specificity of place, than with thinking about the unknown city in relation to their own.
For Venetians, in particular, the visual experience of Tenochtitlan - a city in the remoteness of new worlds that looked convincingly like their own - came to resonate in undeniable ways. In Benedetto Bordone’s Libro (1528) , viewers are confronted with mirroring images of Venice and Tenochtitlan, whose curious designation as island cities, distinguishes them from the others. Unlike earlier isolarii , Bordone inserts newly encountered islands in the Atlantic alongside islands of the ancient world. With the inclusion of new worlds, the isolario would have inspired thoughts of the globe’s dissimilar geographies, and, for Europeans, its uneven histories. When faced with Bordone’s map of Venice, a city whose urbanscape was closely tied to its history of origins, viewers, especially
Venetians, would have been encouraged to reflect on their city’s claims to Roman and early Christian lineage. Bordone’s map participated in rehearsing this myth of origins.
When the map of Venice is interpreted together with the map of
Tenochtitlan, as Bordone seems to insist, the pairing of the two cities highlights the otherness of Tenochtitlan. This otherness, defined by Tenochtitlan’s temporal and religious isolation from Europe’s historical narratives, is aggravated by the city’s uncertain place in the order of things. However, in these visible resemblances, there is also an implicit allusion to sameness, one that makes a claim for Christianity and, more importantly, for the religiosity of Venice.
Through Christianisation, Tenochtitlan, a synecdoche for other pagan islands of the Atlantic, can become like the holy republic of Venice.
Yet the mirroring effect between Venice and Tenochtitlan is, in fact, working in both directions. While the image of Tenochtitlan, when interpreted in light of Venice, brings forward pressing concerns about the origins of new worlds, it also opened up a space in the minds of Venetians for re-thinking their city’s urban form. At a historical moment when Venice was redefining its relationship to its environment, Venetians looked to other insular settings, such as
Tenochtitlan, for inventive ways of dealing with its waterworks. This preoccupation with water, a “matter of concern” as Bruno Latour would describe it, gathered Venetians together in a shared pursuit of re-envisioning the lagoon.
It compelled individuals, particularly those interested in humanistic ideals, to re-
1 Crouzet-Pavan, “Venice and Torcello: History and Oblivion.”
2 Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things Public,” in Making
Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy , eds. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press, Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, 2005), 14.
94
invent Venice along utopic lines. As Ramusio’s map suggests, an idea of
Tenochtitlan as a city with utopic solutions to water management was forged in printed images that circulated in Venice. This was affirmed in Fracastoro’s pronouncement that Venice would be transformed into a city like Tenochtitlan and Cornaro’s unrealized design for the Bacino of San Marco. Bordone’s map encourages viewers to interpret Tenochtitlan on Venice’s terms; Ramusio’s map, on the other hand, makes a compelling argument for the ways Venetians were rethinking their city in view of Tenochtitlan.
Intriguingly, Venice was re-imagined as a city that no longer existed.
While Mexico City emerged as the capital of the Spanish Americas, on the ruins of Tenochtitlan, it was the Cortés map of 1524 and its derivatives – representing an island city inscribed in the middle of a lake – that would maintain a strong hold on the imaginations of Europeans for centuries. Indeed, the real city of
Tenochtitlan had effectively been eclipsed by an image of itself that rapidly multiplied in printed island books and travel narratives across Europe.
95
Figures
Figure 1: La gran ciudad de Temixtitan (Tenochtitlan, 1524) . Praeclara
Fernanandi di Nova Maris Oceani Hispania Narratio (Nuremberg, 1524).
96
Figure 2: Jacopo de’Barbari, Venetie. Printed by Anton Kolb (Venice, 1500).
97
Figure 3: Venetia, Benedetto Bordone, Libro di Benedetto Bordone
(Venice, 1528).
98
Figure 4: La gran città di Temixtitan, Benedetto Bordone, Libro di Benedetto
Bordone (Venice, 1528).
99
Figure 5: Temistitan, Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Terzo Volume delle Navigationi e Viaggi (Venice, 1528).
100
Figure 6: Nova Mexico, Arnoldus Montanus, De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weeereld
(Amsterdam, 1671).
101
Figure 7: Konrad Morant, View of Strasbourg , 1548. Germanisches
Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.
102
Figure 8: Detail, La gran ciudad de Temixtitan (Tenochtitlan, 1524) . Praeclara
Fernanandi di Nova Maris Oceani Hispania Narratio (Nuremberg, 1524).
103
Figure 9: Pourtrait et Description de la grand cite de Temistitan, ou, Tenuctutlan, ou selon aucuns Messico, ou, Mexico, ville capitale de la Nueva Espaigne,
Antoine Du Pinet, Plantz, Pourtraitz et Descriptions de plusieurs villes et forteresses, tant de l’Europe, Asie, & Afrique, que des Indes et terres neuves
(Lyon, 1564).
104
Figure 10: Mexico, Georg Braun, Civitates orbis terrarum (Cologne, 1572).
105
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