Pictorial Theories by Missionaries in Sixteenth-century New Spain: the Capacities of Hieroglyphs as Media in Transcultural Negotiation

Abstract

This article discusses image theories of missionaries in sixteenth-century New Spain. It contextualizes the practice of adapting indigenous Mesoamerican iconography by mendicant friars for the purpose of evangelization within contemporaneous European debates about Egyptian hieroglyphs, seen by many authors in the period as akin to the pictographs used in central Mexico. The article argues that the supposed universal legibility of these visual systems prompted friars not only to use images as tools for teaching Church doctrine, but to incorporate select indigenous symbols into Christian devotional art. Such formal similarities between Egyptian, Mexican, and Christian iconography were used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as evidence for the original unity of all religions. The text outlines the connection with Renaissance theories about the special quality of Egyptian hieroglyphs which were—in the Hermetic tradition—said to contain ancient wisdom entrusted to the Egyptians by God. Comparison between Egyptian writing and Mexican pictographic symbols raised a debate on whether the latter had the same dignity as the former. With this debate in mind, the Christian iconographies integrating pre-Hispanic glyphs gained a different status.