Mesoamerican Things in the Italian Renaissance: The Reception of Pre-Hispanic Indigenous Artifacts in Early Modern Italy

The circulation of Mesoamerican material culture in early modern Europe is usually thought of as the result of the famous conquistadors’ shipments that reached Spain and other Habsburg domains, where they caused proverbial wonder among local observers such as Albrecht Dürer. Recent research, however, has shown that some of the most iconic Mesoamerican objects now in European museums were brought to Italy in the 16th century by Dominican missionaries, who presented them to the Pope as part of their strategy to gain support for their evangelical activities. Paradoxically, objects that had been confiscated for their use in “idolatrous” practices were re-signified and valorized as tangible proof of the ingenuity, rationality, and convertibility of the indigenous peoples.

Once in Italy, turquoise mosaics, pictorial manuscripts, featherwork, and precious stone sculptures circulated as gifts, entering a dense network of local collections where they were treasured and displayed alongside works of art such as Michelangelo’s drawings or Caravaggio’s paintings. And it was in these surprisingly diverse exhibition spaces that Mesoamerican objects have been preserved to this day, in contrast to what happened in Spain.

The early modern interest in material objects as sources of knowledge, shared by both antiquarians and natural historians, meant that Mesoamerican artifacts were described, studied, and visually reproduced by a wide range of scholars and artists. Their works, though often plagued by colonial tropes and an increasing exoticism, also contain valuable information and constitute key sources for the study of ancient Mesoamerican material culture and its reception in Italian Renaissance intellectual circles.

Davide Domenici is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Department of History and Cultures, University of Bologna (Italy). He has directed the Río La Venta Archaeological Project (Mexico, 1998-2010) and the Cahokia Project (USA, 2011-2017). For the last twenty years, he has been studying the technology of Mesoamerican manuscript painting using non-invasive scientific methods. Together with Diana Magaloni and Alyce De Carteret, he curated the exhibition We Live in Painting. The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art, currently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

His current research explores the cultural biographies of Mesoamerican artifacts brought to Italy in the 16th century. As part of this research, he is co-editing two volumes: Codex Cospi: Life and Meanings of a Mesoamerican Pictorial Manuscript (with Élodie Dupey García and Guilhem Olivier, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna) and Global Aldrovandi. Exchanging Nature in the Early Modern World (with Lia Markey, Brill). At Dumbarton Oaks, Davide is working on his book project on the Italian social life of Mesoamerican things.