Without a Face: Voicing Moctezuma II's Image at Chapultepec Park, Mexico City

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Without a Face: Voicing Moctezuma II’s Image at Chapultepec Park, Mexico City

Patrick Thomas Hajovsky

The Chapultepec Sculptures

The sixteenth-century Dominican friar, Diego Durán, spent most of his young life in central Mexico, specifically Tetzcoco, where he learned the indigenous language Nahuatl and saw the local remains of Aztec art.1 At some point during his adult career, near the capital city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, he observed five portraits of Mexica rulers at Chapultepec Hill—beginning with Moctezuma I (r. 1440–1468) and ending with that king’s great-grandson, Moctezuma II (r. 1502–1520) (Plate 14). Some remains of Moctezuma II’s portrait can still be found in situ, despite five centuries of colonial obliteration and neglect, yet what Durán reported is very different than what can still be seen. There are no other known fragments of the sculpture, so we can only view what remains in situ, which is still significant and allows for both a partial reconstruction and analysis of Moctezuma II’s image as it once stood (Figure 7.1).2 The majority of damage was done to the king’s body, but legible on either side are three hieroglyphs in rough columns. Of his body, the only remains are parts of his feet with sandals, the sides of his legs with an intact leg ornament, and his right elbow, which raises a chicahuaztli staff that is partially intact. He stands face-forward above sculptures symbolizing water and earth. Otherwise, the sculpture’s center, once carved in deep relief, now only indexes a fatal impact. Conversely, the six hieroglyphs were carved in low relief, and the polished surface around them belies the fact that they withstood deliberate attempts to peck them away.

Though two of these hieroglyphs are only partially discernible and must remain conjectural (Figure 7.1e, f), it is clear that they, and three

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others (Figure 7.1a, c, d), are Calendar Round dates, which intersect both the Aztec 260-day divinatory cycle and the 365-day solar cycle and thus contain several layers of symbolic meaning. The remaining glyph is the emblem of Moctezuma II, and conspicuously non-calendrical (Figure 7.1b). This glyph is composed of a head without a face, but implied by hair and three turquoise ornaments—a royal crown and nose and ear ornaments—rendered in profile. Many scholars agree that these pictographs, as also found in colonial manuscript sources, compose a phonetic symbol of the ruler’s spoken name. The Nahuatl is pronounced mo-teuc-tzon-ma, and the indigenous rebus writing system composes the crown and turquoise ornaments (teuc-tli) for -teuc- and the head of hair (tzon-tli) for -tzon- (the initial mo- and final -ma are inferred by this arrangement). However, this

7.1 Reconstruction of Moctezuma II’s portrait at Chapultepec Hill (not to scale due to curvature of the rock): (a) 1 Crocodile; (b) Headdress (Name) Glyph; (c) 2 Reed; (d) 1 Reed; (e) 1 Jaguar; (f) 1 Flint; (g) feathered teoatl-tlachinolli; (h) chicahuaztli staff and Xipe Totec ornament on leg (drawing: Patrick Thomas Hajovsky).


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king’s emblem is a composite of symbols, and it has provoked controversy. Scholars disagree over whether it signifies Moctezuma himself, the office he held, or a title of lordship. All are possible, but the monuments that hold the king’s name glyph were apparently carved in the Late Imperial Period and are thus assigned to the reigns of Ahuitzotl (r. 1486–1502) and Moctezuma II. Since there are several monuments that bear Ahuitzotl’s name glyph, it stands to reason that Moctezuma II also commissioned his name to appear on some of his monuments.

As I will show, there is much more about the name glyph at Chapultepec than meets the eye, for its visual elements refer to multiple sensorial metaphors. Moctezuma’s inscribed name is really an array of royal accoutrements pertaining to the king’s solar essence and chief office, both of which manifest in the ornaments that compose the king’s pictographic, and therefore spoken, name.3 Furthermore, as in several stone monuments that bear Moctezuma II’s name, the hieroglyph at Chapultepec includes a speech scroll emerging from the absent mouth. In fact, of the eight Mexica monuments that bear Moctezuma II’s name glyph, six of them contain different versions of the speech scroll.4 The scroll can be interpreted as the title of supreme ruler, or huey tlahtoani, which translates as “Great Speaker.” Yet this title, and therefore this glyph, is more than a metaphor of the king’s rule by verbal command. The speech glyph conveys a distinct Mexica trope of fame as Moctezuma’s image was self-consciously invested into living rock at Chapultepec. While some Mexica verbal metaphors are still traceable in the sculpture, the scroll at Chapultepec is semantically arranged in a way that is significant and unique, but has heretofore been unexplored. The sculpture keys into aspects of the Great Speaker’s inalienable fame that are not based on a sense of sculptural embodiment; rather, they continue to exist within a dual metaphor of the king’s verbal command and vivifying solar essence.

Despite the fact that the sculptural remains are in situ, Durán’s work must stand in for much of what has been effaced, as colonial-period sources often serve to illuminate the pre-Columbian past to postcolonial viewers. Ironically, however, his act of viewing and historicizing the sculpture has silenced its hieroglyphs, which operated on ritual and historical registers that Durán kept discrete from his history. Instead, he stresses the impact of viewing the portrait and relies exclusively on a visual vocabulary that, while informed in Mexica history and Nahuatl poetics, conforms to Spanish historical practices rather than an appreciation of Aztec ritual. That is, even though he spoke Nahuatl, he neglects to mention verbal metaphors that tie to the body and costume, its placement in the landscape, and the hieroglyphs that surround the sculpture. It can still be seen in Chapultepec Park, Mexico City, but its physical effacement and Durán’s importance as a guide to the sculpture have left only an oblique view of its original importance, and it remains largely forgotten.5



Diego Durán and the Portrait

The Dominican friar, who was sympathetic toward indigenous history, sought to preserve it by recounting the acts of the Aztec royal dynasty as historical facts, rather than ritual constructions within a religion he believed idolatrous. Writing nearly 60 years after the Spanish Conquest, Durán composed his work into two discrete parts—The History of the Indies of New Spain, and The Book of the Gods and Rites and The Ancient Calendar—thus salvaging the salient truths of history apart from Aztec ritual and other idolatrous behavior. Though bound alongside his accounts of Aztec festivals and the calendar, the History contains information about the Chapultepec portraits, which conclude each of the chapters about the last half of the Mexica royal dynasty. Durán spoke Nahuatl and used indigenous sources, and he cites the titles of many different Mexica political and religious offices, often translating them to what he thought to be their Spanish equivalent. Interestingly, however, he does not use the title “Great Speaker” (huey tlahtoani) in his narrative, instead translating it to the Spanish rey (king). As I shall demonstrate, calling Moctezuma the “Great Speaker” would recall ritual orations in the political landscape. Instead, Durán structures his narrative as an anecdotal succession of kings analogous to the Roman tradition of Suetonius, a genre he employed to herald the Spanish Catholic monarch. This genre insists that indigenous kingship be rendered in terms of an historical progression of deeds, as part of a teleological history centering on the fame of Hernán Cortés, the Spanish monarchy, and ultimately God.6 Aztec sculptures are severely affected by this decontextualization, especially because we rely largely on colonial-period documents to understand Aztec history, and very few written sources correspond to the extant monuments.

While Durán consulted with indigenous informants and used indigenous pictorial codices, he also claims to have personally seen the portraits at Chapultepec. He remarks that they were “very lifelike” in their “ornamentation” (el aderezo) and “personal features,” and he often quotes the kings’ reactions to their portraits. Yet the kings’ “words” reflect Durán’s imagination of Aztec kingship, as his History results from the classical training that he and other Tetzcocan youth received in the second quarter of the sixteenth century.7 To this end, he overlaps and opposes the stories of the two Moctezumas in order to fulfill his drama of the Conquest of Mexico, and their portraits are at the forefront of this conflict. Durán recounts that Moctezuma I exclaimed when he saw his portrait next to that of his military advisor: “I am well pleased with these images! They will remain as a perpetual memorial to our greatness … So let us project our glory into the future!”8 In contrast, Moctezuma II’s reaction appears embedded within the omens preceding the Conquest of Mexico, specifically after a narrative about what was to be that king’s grandest monument—the carving of a sun stone, a project that ends



ominously. After the enchanted stone taunts and finally kills many of the king’s priests and carvers, Moctezuma II realizes his growing disfavor with the gods and orders his last portrait to be carved at Chapultepec. When he finally witnesses it, he weeps and moans out: “If our bodies were as durable in this life as this carved effigy is upon the rock, who would be afraid of death? But I know that I must perish and this is the only memorial that will remain of me!”9 Durán rhetorically opposes the kings according to prescribed notions of fame and mortality, and these notions are built within the portraits’ realism, which alone has the power to reveal to each king his individual historical grandeur. Other authors in this volume explore similar (but failed or altered) European pretensions of illusionism and realism to transform the behavior of non-Europeans (Saleema Waraich, Yoriko Kobayashi-Sato and Mia Mochizuki). Yet Durán relies on the fact of Spanish domination, as his History situates acts of viewing the “lifelike” portraits within a lesson of good and bad kingship. Whereas Moctezuma I’s portrait causes him to reflect upon his rising fame and glory, Moctezuma II’s gaze reifies his impending mortal downfall on the eve of the Conquest.

Durán’s indigenous painter, or tlacuilo (pl. tlacuiloqueh), who was trained in both pre-Hispanic and European modes of representation, responds to the sculpture in a similar way while relying on indigenous graphic conventions (Figure 7.2). The illustration accompanies the narrative of Moctezuma I, but it

7.2 The Creation of Moctezuma I’s Portrait at Chapultepec, Diego Durán, Historia de las Indias de la Nueva España, Chapter XXXI, 1581, Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional.



could stand in for either king named Moctezuma.10 It is framed by a cartouche that breaks three-dimensionally from the page, and Moctezuma appears in three separate times and places: as an illustration of the king on his throne (right); accompanied by his military advisor, Tlacaelel, both disguised as humble folk on their way to inspect the portraits (center); and as a portrait sculpted in stone at Chapultepec (Hill of the Grasshopper), identified by its place glyph above the hill (left). The pictorial interplay of sight across the three scenes in the illustration suggests that the sculpture was more viewable than the king himself, agreeing with most Nahuatl and Spanish accounts which state that his people had to cast their eyes downward when in his presence. Nevertheless, the illustration shows Moctezuma on his throne both dictating and posing for his portrait, which his four imperial sculptors closely observe. As the king’s mortal and immortal bodies are merged into one frame, the tlacuilo parallels Durán’s statements about the portrait’s resemblance to the king through the use of name glyphs. While one glyph floats in ambiguous space above Moctezuma commanding on his throne, the other appears carved into the rock near the portrait at Chapultepec. The name glyph carries a wide semantic range in this illustration, as designator of the living king and as identifier of the king’s portrait sculpture, which the indigenous painter most certainly had observed. Still, the sculpture of Moctezuma II shows that both Durán and his painter ignored the calendrical glyphs and Mexica insignia that were originally part of the sculpture.

By structuring his History as a chronological sequence of kings, Durán’s work paralleled ancient Mexican practices of historical reckoning. Biographical histories were not unknown in pre-Conquest Mesoamerica, as can be seen by the person-centered (res gestae) histories of the Mixtecs of Oaxaca, who were contemporaries of the Aztecs and whose manuscripts shared iconographic similarities. But as Elizabeth Boone finds, the Aztecs did not adopt this kind of person-centered history into their manuscript tradition, preferring instead the narrative structure of annals and cartographic histories, which organize events according to time and space respectively.11 Though Durán indicates that Mexica kings desired to have their deeds recorded in stone and in manuscripts, very little of this tradition has survived. The surviving monuments at Chapultepec must have carried considerable weight in a place with such a fragmented past as Mexico-Tenochtitlan in the late sixteenth century, as they tied together European and indigenous histories.

From Hieroglyphs to History

By the turn of the seventeenth century, alphabetic literacy opened a space for mestizo (Nahua-Spanish) writers to criticize the destruction of images



throughout central Mexico, and to support their reformation of indigenous history with lost sculptures. Writing 30 years after Durán, before 1608, the mestizo historian Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl reframed the biography of his ancestor Nezahualcoyotl of Tetzcoco by ascribing him with European notions of Christianity and heraldry.12 While this method of legitimization is not uncommon among mestizo scholars, Alva Ixtlilxochitl describes the imagery of an ancient, lost portrait of Nezahualcoyotl at the hill of Tetzcotzingo, near Tetzcoco:

… there was a sculpted rock, the circumference of which [contained] the years from the birth of king Nezahualcoyotl to the present age, and outside … there was also carved the most memorable things that he did; and on the inside of the circle his coat-of-arms, which was a house burning in flames and ruined; another was very emblazoned with buildings, and between the two a deer’s foot with a very precious stone in it, and coming from the foot some crests made of precious feathers; and likewise a doe [or hind], and in it an arm grasping a bow with some arrows, and as an armed man with his helmet and earflaps, breastplate, and two jaguars on the sides from whose mouth came water and fire, and on the border twelve heads of kings and gentlemen, and other things that the first archbishop of Mexico Fray Juan of Zumárraga [1530–1548] sent to pieces, understanding them to be some idols, and all it referred to was the etymology of his coat-of-arms.13

In this passage, Alva Ixtlilxochitl suggests that the sculptures at Tetzcotzingo had qualities analogous to Spanish notions of historical truth, as with the native annals for Durán and other chroniclers.14 His emblematic description of the hieroglyphs follows in the footsteps of petitions for escudos, or coats-of-arms, by indigenous nobility and by cabeceras (townships), and these escudos are filled with both European and Aztec heraldic emblems.15 He thus repositions the fame of Nezahualcoyotl into a comparable Spanish noble hierarchy under the Hapsburgs, and he does so through the commensuration of Spanish and indigenous heraldry.

Alva Ixtlilxochitl also had access to the beautifully illustrated Relación de Tezcoco, which included portraits of several Tetzcocan kings in a manuscript now known as Codex Ixtlilxochitl (Plates 15, 16). Of these portraits, only Nezahualcoyotl is presented in a running pose, which is somewhat similar to the pinwheel position of human and deity figures in pre-Columbian manuscripts, but distinct insofar as his body is gestural and not merely a frame for costume and body ornament.16 Portraiture is rare even in colonial-period manuscripts, and so Donald Robertson associates this genre of manuscript production with the Chapultepec portraits of Tenochca kings.17 However, there are crucial differences between this portrait and any other found in pre-Columbian or colonial-period sources. For instance, the portrait of Nezahualpilli, who was Nezahualcoyotl’s son and who died shortly before the Conquest, appears in Codex Ixtlilxochitl more static and



frontal, as he is dressed and posed for a courtly ceremony (Plate 16). Yet he exhibits contrapposto, derived from Classical sources and widely employed during the sixteenth century. Robertson suggests that two different Tetzcocan tlacuiloqueh created the portraits of Nezahualcoyotl and his son.18 Nevertheless, it is clear that the artists worked closely together on facial expressions and gestures, as well as conveying in three dimensions the bodily accoutrements formerly conveyed in two-dimensional pictographs. The portraits in Codex Ixtlilxochitl relate a personality while adhering to a specific notion of the king’s fame, which is conveyed through face, gesture, and costume.

The portrait of Moctezuma II at Chapultepec is frontal, as is Nezahualpilli’s portrait in Codex Ixtlilxochitl, but the feet of the sculpture suggest that it did not stray from indigenous conventions, which rarely exhibit such naturalism in proportion or weight. In stark contrast, Nezahualcoyotl’s portrait is dynamic and active, as if the king were running to battle in full military regalia (compare Plates 14 and 16 with Plate 15). Rather than a static image, we are to understand this king as an active agent, as written also in the Relación de Tezcoco, which describes the king’s many feats. Since such illustrations correspond to texts about the kings and their historical legacies, they continued to be a trusted source for both indigenous and Spanish audiences into the middle colonial period. The sculptural remains at Chapultepec and Tetzcotzingo, however, contained hieroglyphic images that were mistrusted by Spanish authorities in the early years following the Conquest of Mexico. This is most likely because, despite the decimation of indigenous populations after the Conquest, there were people available to interpret the sculpted signs, as we are warned by Bishop Zumárraga’s action upon the revered “idol” of Nezahualcoyotl at Tetzcotzingo.

There is no record that Spanish authorities observed the same kind of irreverent behavior toward the sculptures at Chapultepec, nor to suggest their destruction under the bishop’s purview. Durán does not suggest iconoclasm at Chapultepec, nor does Fernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc, who was the grandson of Moctezuma II and a contemporary of Alva Ixtlilxochitl, and who, like Durán, relied on a now-lost manuscript to write his Historia mexicana (1598).19 Alvarado Tezozomoc describes Moctezuma II’s portrait in fuller detail, and while the description departs somewhat from the extant remains, it also fills in details now lost from the original sculpture:

They made him as he was of small frame, [and a] well-made, good face, with a headdress crossed with feathers of the tlauhquechol, and in his nose they very subtly painted a golden rod, emerald green ear plugs called xiuhtezcanacochtli [and a] golden lip plug. [Around] the wristband of the right arm and right foot [were] bands of jaguar skin, with his shield and a bell called omichicahuaz, [which was] positioned on a throne covered with jaguar skin … looking with much gravity.20



Alvarado Tezozomoc describes gold, jaguar skin, and emeralds in reference to the sculpture’s many ornaments, as well as a lost shield, which apparently was paired with the extant chicahuaztli staff he also describes (Figure 7.1h). Interestingly, unlike Alva Ixtlilxochitl, who focuses on the hieroglyphic inscriptions as emblems at Tetzcotzingo, Durán and Alvarado Tezozomoc completely ignore the hieroglyphic inscriptions at Chapultepec. As we have seen, if Durán did gaze upon the hieroglyphs at Chapultepec, he did not put them into his History, but neither did Alvarado Tezozomoc, whose description is much more detailed and who might otherwise have described them in a similar way as Alva Ixtlilxochitl describes Nezahualcoyotl’s portrait. Nevertheless, in all cases, the written page’s authority and the portrait’s potential as a reproducible likeness overshadow its actual hieroglyphic context. This suggests that the oral culture surrounding indigenous ritual had completely succumbed to the written word, and that gazing upon the portrait of Moctezuma had transformed from an act of reading and reciting the hieroglyphs to an act of seeing and notating the king’s deeds through face and costume.

“Speaking” Signs

As indigenous sculpture shifted from sacred entities in the political landscape to historical objects in books, an oral tradition linked to visual signs in the pre-Conquest period shifted to the written and silent alphabetic word during the colonial period.21 Writing, for Durán, was a method of ascribing the historical deeds of kings to his own notions of history while negating the ritual significance of the monuments. Nonetheless, the hieroglyphs at Chapultepec still speak a different story, and are still the important sculptural message of the king’s renown. The Crónica X and those who follow this narrative have tried to interpret the facial countenance of Moctezuma, and H.B. Nicholson is correct when he states that the Aztecs had the technical know-how to sculpt a natural portrait.22 Yet Aztec art conveys essential properties through connections to place, cosmos, and hieroglyphs. The sculpture’s significance would derive not solely through the king’s body, but also through the sights and sounds that surround it, as well as through the place it occupies in the Valley of Mexico.

Like other sculptures in situ, the Chapultepec portrait occupies a distinct place in relation to indigenous notions of ritual and sacred space, and it does so by commanding the king’s presence at a particular point in the Valley of Mexico (Figure 7.3). Although the historical record does not detail many rituals involving Chapultepec, the hieroglyphic inscriptions on either side of the figure leave no doubt that it was integral to indigenous calendrical cycles. The hieroglyphs correspond to dates



significant to Mexica history, and particularly Moctezuma’s reign and the 52-year cycle in which he lived.23 The sculpture’s location suggests its importance to both environment and vista towards the capital, Tenochtitlan, and its importance to kings continued well into the colonial period. Viceroys entering the city in the seventeenth century would make their penultimate stop there to gather a grand vista of the city before taking the throne in Mexico-Tenochtitlan (Figure 7.3).24 The site surely had a discrete connection to kingship in the Aztec era, as there would have been people who were called upon to read and interpret the signs at given moments. When this would have occurred in the ritual cycle can only be speculated at this point, but it is certain that the hieroglyphic account would have been legible to the same wise men and women who read and interpreted signs in painted manuscripts, and to those who sculpted signs in stone.

Durán of course did not trust ritual orators or their orations, understanding their recitations to be filled with hidden idolatrous metaphors. However,

7.3 Forma y levantado de la ciudad de México, Juan Gómez de Trasmonte, 1628, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.



he did appreciate the aesthetics of the Nahuatl language, and this reflects his appreciation of Aztec art and ritual in general. Concerning the songs he heard, he remarked that they were interwoven with obscure and complex metaphors, and that:

there is hardly a man who can understand them unless they are studied in a very special way and explained so as to penetrate their meaning. For this reason I have intentionally set myself to listen with much attention to what is sung; and while the words and terms of the metaphors seem nonsense to me, afterward, having discussed and conferred [with the natives, I can see that] they seem to be admirable sentences, both in the divine things composed today and in the worldly songs.25

Despite his appreciation of Nahuatl language and art, he knew most of his audience would not understand such complex metaphors. He continues: “I believe that in general there is nothing to reprehend in this case. I say ‘I believe’ because there might be a slip here …” Rather than record these potentially mistrustful ritual orations, Durán and others who followed the Crónica X focus on viewing and appreciating the sculpture’s visual impact.

As such, colonial sources help with the interpretation of hieroglyphs and indigenous representations, but they are fraught with hermeneutical problems. Gary Tomlinson astutely observes that “[w]hen Nahuatl was written in Latin characters, its ties to a whole view of reality were subtly undone.”26 Following other critics of the Cantares mexicanos, a Nahuatl songbook written in the sixteenth century, he cautions not to limit Nahuatl poetic tropes to the domain of literature. Nahuatl oral recitations provided for a greater metaphysical reality that is cross-signaled in images, such as a page from the central Mexican manuscript Codex Borbonicus (Figure 7.4). In the large upper cell, a priest dressed as Macuilxochitl (5 Flower), the patron of music, plays a drum and sings before the deity Huehuecoyotl (Oldest Coyote), as song volutes spill from his mouth and culminate in a grand flower-song glyph above.27 For Tomlinson this image demonstrates the Mesoamerican penchant to consider painted images “presentations rather than representations,” or to consider painting as poetry. In particular, he suggests that from a Western perspective, the song volutes “seem to materialize song, conflating it with painted substance in the encoding of the world.” However, “[f]rom the indigenous perspective they probably affirmed something so self-evident to the Mesoamerican mentality as to be unnoticed: the cognate materialities of paint and song.”28 In other words, Mexica images have a metonymic relationship with the world around them, and the aesthetic experience of looking is analogous to hearing, as both are part of a contiguity of essences shared across ritual experiences.



Many colonial-period texts, including the Cantares, record Mexica poetic tropes such as feathers, flowers, and shimmering things, which were considered the inalienable possession of Aztec nobles. Current research suggests that Mesoamerican cosmogony is most akin to monism, which acknowledges only one principle or being across mind and matter.29 The perceptible world was thus united with the spiritual world through a notion of “blended” or “shared essences.”30 The Western analogy of synaesthesia illuminates this concept, such that sights resemble smells, which resemble sounds, through a phenomenological association between cognate essences therein, which, in Mesoamerica, were referenced and reinforced in language and art. Images continue to reference phenomenological concepts through metaphors, and these form part of a metonymical chain of being that centers on a shared

7.4 Macuilxochitl and Huehuecoyotl, Codex Borbonicus, p. 4 (1), ca. 1521, Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale Française.



Mesoamerican concept of life-giving energy, tonalli, which manifests in cultural constructs such as the body, political hierarchy, or cosmos. Cultural artifacts form one domain of ritual experience, and evidence presented above suggests that aural and olfactory senses were sometimes considered the primary senses to access ritual meaning. Yet given the necessity to use artifacts to interpret indigenous tropes, Emily Umberger stresses a method that considers both “external” metaphors as well as “internal” metaphors, which “were based on ‘shared essences’ as well as emotional reinforcement.”31 Metaphors, in addition to having visual and semantic analogs in different representations, extend to anagogic qualities shared among the senses. For example, certain fragrances of flowers in Mesoamerica connote luxurious things, which in turn connoted the “flowery” words that distinguished a king, lord or god. A flower, in fact, is a type of glyph that refers to song in pictorial imagery, as it qualifies the grand volute sung by Macuilxochitl in the Codex Borbonicus illustration (Figure 7.4).

Concerning the Chapultepec portrait of Moctezuma II, it is clear that several concepts of the body and cosmos manifest in the king’s desire for fame. The sculpture stands overall at about two meters, including a headdress; the ends of two banners and two feather sprays are notable around the periphery of the fracture. The king’s body was frontal and about life-size, and in these respects the sculpture departs from other known Mexica royal sculptures. It might be understood as a teixiptla, a “representation” of a person in which individualism is subordinated to an ideal deification, but the sculpture is moreover a representation of the king’s inherent cosmological powers sustained through a teixiptla.32 Mexica rituals and kingship both operate alongside ideas of a sacred aura that is transmutable within the body and transmittable from body to body, as part of tonalli, which resides in every person’s body heat and in the sun.33 At Chapultepec, what remains of Moctezuma’s costume specifically conveys Xipe Totec (Our Lord, The Flayed One), the god of springtime and a particularly famous bloody warrior ritual known as the Tlacaxipehualiztli, or “Flaying of Men Ceremony” (Figure 7.1h).34 As Alvarado Tezozomoc attests, there was probably also a shield in the blank space in Moctezuma’s left hand, which may have accompanied the darts and banners commonly seen with the deity. The sculpture faces eastward and overlooks the city, and thus faces the rising sun, which is also referenced by an older solar shield that lies in another enclosure above Moctezuma II’s portrait, also identified with Xipe Totec.35 It may be the case that the other lost portraits were dressed as this deity, as it was one of the largest and most fearsome ritual spectacles in Tenochtitlan, at least since the time of Moctezuma I.

Continuing with the extant imagery, the space between the shield and Moctezuma’s left leg contains a glyph clearly resembling the speech glyph that forms part of his name (Figure 7.1b, g). This is identified as the teoatl-tlachinolli glyph, the symbol of blood and fire that connotes war.36 The



symbol actually stands for a range of metaphysical transformations, which both the king and Mexica warriors shared in service to the sun, the source of tonalli, to return its continual sustenance through blood sacrifice. It connotes the idea of warfare through its products—precious blood (human sacrifice) and burned fields (land conquest)—as inscribed in the glyph itself. Liquid is indicated by wavy lines ending in chalchihuitl, or precious greenstones, which metonymically signify a range of objects—such as jade, turquoise, water, and other precious liquids—that are connected by essence, the color of earthly life (blue-green), which complements the color of human life (red). The fire strip consists of two plowed rows and a section of burned plots with U-shapes characteristic of the earth and fertility deity Tlazolteotl, though at other times it can take the appearance of the Fire Serpent. The flames at the end of the fire strip represent the lapping tongue of the Fire Serpent in a state of transformation into flickering butterflies. Karl Taube shows this to be a metaphor reaching back to Teotihuacan times (0–600 CE) of the warrior’s transformation from the sacrificial stone, to burning of warrior bundles, to the sun’s continual nourishment, a duty and creed of warriors in the Valley of Mexico henceforth.

The hanging teoatl-tlachinolli is the only remnant of the lost shield, and it differs from that emerging from the name glyph in that it contains a semantic qualifier of feathers, two of which extend from the fire glyph (Figure 7.1b, g). In addition to this verbal qualifier, the ornament’s placement and orientation suggest a different semantic association than is found in the name glyph. In her research of early colonial featherworking traditions, Alessandra Russo shows that the shimmer of feathers conflated notions of tonalli and divinity to Christianized Nahuas, thus allowing this art to proliferate in early Spanish missions. Her research suggests, moreover, that the warrior’s tonalli was transferred to concepts of the Eucharist and feathered images of Christ. Many textual sources emphasize the metaphorical relationship between feathers and sacrificial victims, but as Russo notes, the metonymical connection between the ephemeral material and the image moves anagogically beyond vision, as it became related to the transubstantiation of Christ’s body. Because the Chapultepec teoatl-tlachinolli hangs down like a pendant feather, it is analogous to known examples of Mexica shields, such as the feathered coyote shield in Vienna, which incidentally also “speaks” a teoatl-tlachinolli rendered in feathers and gold (Figure 7.5). I suggest that the sculptural rendition of Moctezuma’s name thus semantically keys into a partial list of Mexica sacred objects. As part of the Moctezuma/Xipe Totec shield, the feather attachment on the teoatl-tlachinollli delves into a complex metonym by referencing Moctezuma’s verbal command and feather ornamentation. The visual relationship between the glyphs relates the metaphor—“Moctezuma’s words are the shield’s feathers”—and yet it does so by virtue of a chain of ritualized experiences related to the teoatl-tlachinolli glyph.



Moctezuma’s Fame at Chapultepec

Rather than a portrait in any European sense, the main feature of this monument is the name glyph, which is positioned among a constellation of five date glyphs. The meaning of the entire set of glyphs is complex, but it should be noted that they represent both cyclical dates in the Mexica calendar as well as names of particular deities celebrated on those dates.37 As well, they signify important dates during Moctezuma’s reign. The name glyph functions ambiguously to identify the patron and subject of this sculpture and to denote his connection to a whole set of metaphors, metonyms, and perhaps more discrete tropes that continue throughout the sculpture. The notion of teixiptla was not pushed into the realm of naturalism; rather, the hieroglyphs and

7.5 Feathered Coyote Shield, Aztec, late 15th–early 16th centuries, Vienna, Museum für Völkerkunde.



costume signal Moctezuma’s divinity in association with important events that occurred during his reign. As we compare the possible countenance of the sculpture with its overall meaning, it is important to remember that it operates as both a static and dynamic text according to Mexica notions of cyclical time. Durán, instead of considering the events recorded in hieroglyphs, understands the sculptures as the culmination of each king’s fame and glory, and his linear history flattened Mexica cyclical concepts as it ignored important parts of the actual sculpture.

Durán and the anonymous tlacuilo working under his direction sought to associate the visual resemblance of Moctezuma and his portrait through the illustration. Nevertheless, the actual hieroglyphs at Chapultepec reinforce visual tropes that continue throughout the figural sculpture. As the sculpture represents a teixiptla of Moctezuma by dressing him as an important war patron, it reflects upon the military grandeur of Tenochtitlan and the formidable Tlacaxipehualiztli ceremony. I suggest that one way to access the sculpture’s meaning comes through the Nahuatl language and the categories it may share with Mexica experience. Many metonyms are grammatically marked in Nahuatl with the suffix -yotl, a signifier of part-to-whole relationships and abstract concepts, also used with possessed nouns to indicate inalienable possession.38 Such marked grammatical structures may

yield more clues to indigenous verbal categories of visual representation, especially because the situatedness of the sculpture reinforces notions of place and identity. It is clear that the monument stands in a different relationship to European presence, even if it was responding to news of the arrival of the Spanish on the coast of Veracruz in 1519, as Durán suggests and the date 1 Reed confirms (Figure 7.1d). That is, even though the monument was likely created in the year 1519 on the eve of Moctezuma’s death, it was, above all, part of an ongoing tradition of royal portraiture.

This life-size portrait is different than any known representation of a Mexica king. In the sculpted temple model known as the Teocalli (God-House) of Sacred Warfare, a diminutive profile relief is also identified with Moctezuma II’s emblem (Figure 7.6). Significantly,

7.6 Diagram of the Teocalli de la GuerraSagrada showing location of backrest inscription,Aztec, ca. 1507, Mexico City: Museo Nacional deAntropología (drawing: Emily Umberger).



both the Teocalli and the Chapultepec portrait feature the hieroglyph 2 Reed, which marks the Binding of the Years and the New Fire Ceremony of 1507, certainly the most important ritual period during Moctezuma’s reign (Figure 7.1c). Both monuments also feature the teoatl-tlachinolli glyph, and both stress the importance of kingship and solar cycles. In the Teocalli, Moctezuma is dressed as the deity Tepeyollotl-Tezcatlipoca and stands opposite the deity Huitzilopochtli-Xiuhtecuhtli; both offer blood-soaked maguey spines to a large solar disk residing between them.39 The Teocalli is a temple representation and ritual seat, or momoztli, on which the king could sit during particular ceremonies.40 Whether the king actually sat on the momoztli or not, the scale of the Teocalli suggests that his body was envisioned to fit into a complex microcosm, which is carved in relief onto the surfaces of the cubic mass. Thus transformed into a macrocosm on top of the temple representation, he would metaphorically sit on a carved representation of the earth monster and would carry the sun, represented by the solar disk, on his back. In contrast, the statues at Chapultepec face east, the actual moving sun, while referencing the king’s imperial achievements. Both monuments address the sacred duty of warfare through the theme of warrior redemption as embodied in the sun, or tonalli, which was metonymically tied to the king’s verbal command and physical presence. Within the natural environment where the Chapultepec sculpture stands, the actual sun participates with the notion of place and community, or altepetl, and this would have been reinforced in cyclical rituals that are all but lost.41

Nevertheless, if Moctezuma’s fame were at stake in his portrait, the sculpture would operate at both linguistic and metalinguistic modes, employing both mahuitzotl (honor) and tenyotl (fame). Despite these Nahuatl-to-English translations, the concepts are incommensurate to honor and fame as described by Durán, who employs them in a history that culminates with the Conquest. In contrast, mahuitzotl and tenyotl are words that resonate with multi-sensorial ritual experiences in the Mexica political landscape. If the sculpture was ultimately made for the aggrandizement of the king’s public image, then the concepts of mahuitzotl and tenyotl need further analysis in this context.

Mahuitzotl is the type of fame that derives from fear or esteem. It is directly related to the fact that Moctezuma mystified his corporeal body by not allowing anyone to look at him. Mahuitzotl also registers in the teixiptla portrait and in the name glyph, which is composed by the turquoise ornaments of rulership and the royal haircut. These widely known Mesoamerican symbols of authority—the turquoise facial ornaments—come from far more ancient sources that were shared by the Mexica and their neighbors. On a living body, these visual cues highlight the sensorial powers of Mexica lords and convey a metonymical chain of essences



through visual form, color, and surface quality.42 In fact, each turquoise ornament conveys an idea related to the senses as loci of power—smell, hearing, and even tonalli—the latter of which was believed to manifest in the hair.43 The ultimate source of tonalli was the sun, the heat-light energy that animates everything. Moctezuma II was the first and only Mexica king to abstract such wide-ranging multi-sensorial emblems into an icon of divine kingship.44

By employing the speech glyph in his name glyph, Moctezuma’s name conveys not only the idea of huey tlahtoani (Great Speaker), but also a person invested with tenyotl, translated as “lip-ness,” that is, fame associated with epiphenomena of sound (songs, drum cadences, or war cries). The king’s aura manifests not just because of the deflection of sight from his actual body to his sculpture, but also through the use of reverential speech in communication with, and in reference to, the Great Speaker. As Umberger observes, Aztec sculptures link together a human being, an historical event, and a political role to mythic actors, cosmic forces, geography, and cyclical time.45 Moctezuma II’s concept of fame, permanence, and history is present in this sculpture by verbalizing the royal icon and teoatl-tlachinolli speech glyph, and by reciting it with multifarious events recorded in the date hieroglyphs. These dates cycle upon mythic history, deities, and events of Moctezuma’s reign.

In the act of inscribing the Tenochca-Aztec sculptural tradition into the trusted historical format of a book, Durán rhetorically blends together the images of the two Moctezumas to forge a new image of indigenous kingship, which was based on personality as part of a teleological explanation of the Conquest of Mexico. In his tradition, portraits focus on lifelike qualities in order to better explain this history, and thus the three scenes conflated into one image in Durán’s History support a narrative of visual resemblance. The tlacuilo observed the static frontality of the Chapultepec portrait as well as its hieroglyphic name, which emphasizes another mode of resemblance between the king and his portrait. Verisimilitude is noted through the interplay of sight in the illustration, and the name glyph attached to both Moctezuma and his sculpted image acts as emblem and spoken representation, thus underscoring, in indigenous pictographs, Durán’s theory of visual resemblance. Yet again, visual resemblance was not paramount to such representations, which instead used the visual to conjure multi-sensorial experiences in ritual settings. The Chapultepec portrait of Moctezuma II was probably the final and grandest Mexica sculpture, created around the same time that Cortés landed in Veracruz, but it had nothing to do with Spanish perspectives of his empire. Instead, it posed Moctezuma among the great works and deeds of previous rulers, whose renown was verbally recounted in a highly metaphorical language.



Notes

1. Mexica refers to the Nahuatl-speaking people whose capital was Tenochtitlan, on an island in Lake Tetzcoco, now Mexico City. Though they referred to themselves as Mexica, Aztec is a modern term applied to this culture and generally refers to all pre-Conquest Nahuatl-speaking peoples in and around the Valley of Mexico. Nahua refers to all Nahuatl-speaking people during the colonial period.

2. See also Nicholson; Umberger, 1981, pp. 147–151.

3. Hajovsky, book manuscript in progress.

4. Umberger, 1981, pp. 66–71.

5. The site is more famous for the 1847 Battle of Chapultepec during the Mexican–American war. Of the five portraits that Durán reports were made at Chapultepec, only that of Moctezuma II remains (Nicholson; Umberger, 1981; Hajovsky), directly below the Castillo and adjacent to the monument of Los Niños Héroes.

6. Gillespie, 1989, shows that the parallel between the two kings named Moctezuma was emphasized in colonial-period accounts of the Mexica royal dynasty. These accounts, she argues (2007), cast Moctezuma I in a positive role and pinned the blame of the Mexica defeat in the Conquest of Mexico on Moctezuma II.

7. Durán likely had an early humanistic training analogous to what Jacobs, pp. 16–61, describes for Italian writers during the same period. However, Durán’s descriptions of naturalism never move to such visceral detail as his Italian contemporaries.

8. Durán, 1994, pp. 242–243.

9. Durán, 1994, p. 481.

10. Couch, p. 308, shows that a second artist copied Moctezuma II’s coronation portrait from that of Moctezuma I, but he did not give Moctezuma II a name glyph. Moctezuma I is referred to as Moctezuma Ilhuicamina, whose name glyph is most often composed as a sky band with an arrow piercing it, signifying his “second” name “Ilhuicamina.” For reasons yet to be explained, Durán’s representation of Moctezuma’s name is very dissimilar to other examples in manuscripts or sculptures, including Chapultepec.

11. Boone, 2000, p. 163.

12. This is in contrast to earlier Tetzcocan kings, such as Quinatzin, whom Alva Ixtlilxochitl presents as idolaters. See Lesbre; Lee.

13. Alva Ixtlilxochitl, II, p. 115, my translation.

14. Alva Ixtlilxochitl held indigenous annals and cartographic histories, including perhaps Codex Xolotl, Mapa Quinatzin, and Mapa Tlohtzin. See Gibson, 1975, pp. 337–339.

15. For Spanish transformations of indigenous political titles, see Gibson, 1964. The coat-of-arms he describes does not survive as such; however, the Tetzcocan city arms from 1551 contains some of the elements that Alva Ixtlilxochitl discusses in the sculpture at Tetzcotzingo, such as the teoatl-tlachinolli border and six of the twelve heads arranged on the right border of the shield proper.

16. Boone, 2007, pp. 49–51.

17. Robertson, p. 151.

18. Robertson, p. 150.

19. The lost source for Durán and Alvarado Tezozomoc is known as Crónica X. Alva Ixtlilxochitl may have had Codex Xolotl or a cognate, as well as other sources. See Douglas.

20. Alvarado Tezozomoc, p. 451, my translation.

21. See Lockhart, pp. 326–373; Mignolo, pp. 69–170.

22. Nicholson, p. 417.

23. Hajovsky.

24. Schreffler, pp. 20–30. This afforded the newly arrived viceroy a panoramic view of the ordered city, as is also captured in several seventeenth-century biombos, or folding screens.



25. Durán, 1975, pp. 299–300. See also Couch, p. 116, for a discussion of this quote across the Crónica X sources.

26. Tomlinson, p. 29.

27. There are no known surviving pre-Conquest Aztec codices. Though Codex Borbonicus was created shortly after the Spanish Conquest, it is one of only two surviving manuscripts believed to be part of the Aztec tradition of divinatory codices.

28. Tomlinson, p. 39. Boone, 2000, p. 61, also explains that the “ancient Mexicans thought idiomatically and … expressed these idioms both verbally and pictorially.”

29. Houston and Cummins, p. 362.

30. Houston and Taube, p. 263.

31. Umberger, n.d.

32. For an early and thorough study of the concept of teixiptla, see Hvidtfeldt.

33. López Austin, pp. 203–228.

34. Nicholson observes that Moctezuma II is dressed similarly as Xipe Totec in Codex Vaticanus A, and the leg ornament appears as a design in the “Totec” mantle illustrated in Codex Magliabechiano. Umberger, 1981, correctly identifies the name glyph.

35. Umberger, 1981, p. 151. Barnes, pp. 43–44.

36. Alcina Franch, pp. 21–23. The metaphor is known from the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún’s descriptions in his Codex Florentino.

37. Umberger, 1981; Hajovsky.

38. Karttunen, pp. 339, 344.

39. Umberger, 1981; Klein.

40. Umberger, 1984, pp. 63–87.

41. The sculpture’s meaning, as part of perambulatory rituals, still remains a mystery.

42. Houston and Taube; Umberger, n.d.

43. López Austin, pp. 211–212.

44. Hajovsky.

45. Umberger, n.d.

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Without a Face: Voicing Moctezuma II's Image at Chapultepec Park, Mexico City

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