“They Had Fiery Eyes”

Abstract

The mid-sixteenth-century La Casa del que Mató al Animal (Puebla, Mexico) is distinguished by its sculpted doorway, the jambs of which depict two hunters holding chained dogs attacking animals. Likely derived from European tapestries or prints, the work was sculpted by Indigenous artists working for the Spanish owner. A popular legend (first documented in the middle of the nineteenth century) developed around the work, linking its iconography to a story in which a young soldier, motivated by love, was said to have defeated a giant serpent that appeared in Puebla. Clearly, however, the work itself does not support such a reading. This paper, then, will address the appeal of this legend and, more significantly, the period meaning of the work. By placing it in the context of other domestic decoration from the New World and concerns relating to the political narratives of power, status, and conquest, I argue for a connotative reading of the work’s hunting and canine iconography attentive to understandings of the social and political meaning of the Spanish conquest in the period after the passing of the Nuevas leyes(New Laws on the treatment and preservation of the Indians) in 1542, the abolishment of the ayuda (the grant of Indigenous labor from Cholula, Tlaxcala, and elsewhere) in Puebla in 1545, and the Valladolid debate (1550–51) on the rights and treatment of the Indigenous people of the Americas. The work will be read as a powerful expression of conquistadorial ideology (via the work’s connection to the important local leader Gonzalo Díaz de Vargas) at a time when this ideology was under increasing pressure.