 Next speaker for today, Davida Domenici from the Department of History and Cultures at the University of Valonia in Italy, who's going to speak to us today about one of what are in fact many projects that he's involved in, and we're very lucky to have him on the West Coast, partly because of the Vancouver SAAs. I was able to see a version of this talk last summer, and I have to say it's one of the most exciting things I've seen in archaometric approaches in Mesoamerica, but in the interpretation of the archaometric data in particular. And I won't try and read the entire title, it's very long, but it's also helpful I think in terms of describing what the topic would be. With no further ado, I will turn it over to you. Thank you. So first of all, good morning, and then I went to thank Rosemary Joyce, all the staff of the Berkeley Archaeological Research Facility for the opportunity, and let me also thank my old friend and colleague Arianna Campiani. We worked together many years ago in Western Chiapas, and she was instrumental in organizing this opportunity. As Dr. Joyce said you, I'm going to present the results and discuss some implications of the results of a project aimed at identifying chemically characterizing painting materials on Mesoamerican codices. I'm almost sure that, I don't know why, for some reason it doesn't move. It's not moving, try the guarantees. I'm sure you're all familiar with Mesoamerican codices, but just for the sake of clarity, we call codices pictorial manuscripts. Unfortunately, we have today a very restricted number of extant pre-colonial manuscripts. They are 14, 15, depending on how you count them, and they contain lots of calendrical, astronomical, ritual, divinatory, and historical information. Given their importance, as you can imagine, there are only remnants of a huge number of ancient manuscripts that once existed. They have been subject to the object of a long-standing scholarly tradition based on interpretation of their contents and the study of their style. Actually, our knowledge of the practical aspects of their production is extremely reduced. We have, I wouldn't say very much information, but something on the activity of painters, scribes, as you may know, Mesoamerican languages do not distinguish between painting and writing. I just collected here a few images of scribes. For example, these classic Maya images do show codices, classic codices that you can see here with jaguar pelt covers. These are supernatural scribes. These are human scribes in central Mexico. I want to let you note that here we have a woman, and she's bilingual, because this is the day sign in central Mexican style. This is the day sign in Maya style. So probably La Pintora was a bilingual scribe. So we know something about the work of painters and scribes, and a good amount of information is contained in early colonial historical sources. This is the most famous. Bernardino de Sagun Codex Florentinos in book 11. He devotes a full paragraph chapter to the work of painters. Actually, he didn't distinguish very clearly between painters and textile diaries, which is interesting. Apparently the content of the text, which is, for those who are not familiar, bilingual in Nahuatl, and then it has a Spanish translation. He describes various scholars, various painting materials, probably dividing them between those used by painters, which are the first described in the chapter, and those were used by textile in textile dying. So all these said, we have a very, very reduced knowledge of the materiality of this manuscript. Materiality, which is, I would say, pretty surprising. I don't know if any of you have ever had the opportunity of seeing a pictorial manuscript. When I first had the opportunity, because as you will see, one of them, one of the extant pre-colonial one is in Bologna in the city where I work, I was astonished. I was used to work on the most famous, most common facsimile of this course. So I was used to this color hues, and then I opened the real one, the original one, and I was really surprised by the brightness, by the light that was coming out from these pages. So I always wonder about the kind of colors and materials that were used in their production. The only information we had, until a few years ago, came from a small set of invasive, destructive analysis that were done, as you can see, starting in 1912, that were done so taking samples of some of the codices. Actually, this information is not really useful. It is useful, but it's reduced, because in some cases, such as these Maya codices and the Codoscospi, they only analyze the white background, and in other cases, they analyze pigments and colors, but with techniques that today are so old that it's not really, let's say, significant. Then one day, I discovered that in Italy, we have this mobile laboratory called MOLAB, which is an European infrastructure funded by the European Commission, and it is the only mobile laboratory for performing known invasive analysis on works of art. As you can see, they built this mobile lab to be used on works of art that are so precious that moving them, especially for insurance paying, it's impossible. This is Raphael Palaballoni, and you see the MOLAB team working on this painting. The Antonius Gamelotti, who is the director of this lab, explained to me that since this is a European facility, the best project you can apply for to the European Commission is a project that involves various European countries, because that's what they expect. I was thinking about this possibility, and I said, Antonio, Antonio, I have the project for you. In Europe, we have almost all, not all, because a couple of them are in Mexico, but most of extant precolonial colleges are in European countries, and here you see Codex Cospi in his actual section, which is the university library in Bologna. So I thought that it was a real important opportunity, and I was always already working with Codex Cospi for another research project I'm doing. This image maybe is not really meaningful for you, but it's really meaningful, at least for us, because all the object you see in this image had been in Italy in 16 or 17th century, which is pretty surprising. We had no historical documentation about the arrival of this object. There is kind of a paradoxical difference between Spain, where you had lots of inventories, 16th century inventories, and no objects at all. They have no single pre-panic object, and Italy, where we have lots of these stuff. So I am working on archival research, trying to reconstruct the individual biographies of this wonderful set of traveling objects, still trying to understand how they passed in various collections, passing through different regiments of value, high people, how people looked at them, which kind of questions they posed to these objects, etc. And as you can see, five of the pre-colonial codices and various other colonial ones were or are in Italy. These three Borgia, Cospi and Vaticanus B are today in Italy or the Vatican. So I proposed to the Mola Laboratory to start our research project. And so I brought them that were used to work on European paintings in libraries. You can see them here, the team working on Codex Borgia in the Vatican Library. And here you see the Madrid Codex in the New South America in Madrid. And so we started trying to understand which kind of materials were used in the production of these incredible documents. This is the list of the most important analytical techniques we employ. I'm not the chemist of the group, so I won't go into much detail, because it's not my field of expertise, but they are all known invasive techniques so that you do not need to take samples. You can perform how many analyses do you want. Obviously you have limitation of time, especially of time, but so they're pretty useful. Let's say that in very general terms, probably many of you know better than me how this technique works, but in general terms you have some techniques that work on the elemental or molecular level as the XRF, for example, so that they say you which kind of chemical elements are contained into the painting material. And here you see an example, for example, lots of calcium, lots of sulfur, and a little bit of iron. So you can imagine that this is calcium sulfate, which is gypsum, and with traces of an iron-containing element, in this case hematite. So then you have another analytical techniques that, again, at this inorganic level, they provide molecular information, so they tell you something about how these elements are joined in molecules. But the most important part of these techniques are those techniques that help in understanding organic materials, because as you will see, most of these codices were painted with organic material, which is a problem. It's really hard to work with organic colors, because if they are inorganic, it's pretty straightforward. They measure them, they say, okay, this is hematite, this is gypsum. If it is a flower, a yellow flower, can we say, okay, this is a yellow flower, but it's up to you now to understand which kind of flower it is. So you have an example here of near-infrared imaging. This is the actual color image from Codex Madrid, and you can see in this false color as organic elements do emit fluorescence. So you see this pink and orange color, meaning that here you have some organic component. This here is indigo, and here is cochineal for sure. So when you know that there is something organic, you go on with other techniques that tells you something about this organic matter. Just an example from a page of Codex Cospi with three different yellows, orange, and this is the result you have. Basically they say, okay, you have a yellow that emits at this wavelength. You have an orange that emits fluorescence at this wavelength. And here starts the problem because if the dye is well known, and it's indigo or cochineal, for example, the standard spectra are well known. So they say this is cochineal. If it is not well known, you have the problem that my problem now to try to understand which kind of organic dye could be part of this material. So since 2009, we started our project and so far we have analyzed this group of manuscripts. Most of them are pre-colonial, but some of them are also colonial ones, such as seldom roll, seldom, and Mendoza. To this already huge comparative corpus, if you consider how few we knew before, you can add other manuscripts that have been analyzed by other research team that in recent years have started working with similar techniques. And so we have a rather huge comparative corpus today. Today I won't go in detail on a single manuscript if you have some questions that we can go in detail, but I will try to give you a broad comparative discussion. So these are the manuscripts that today comprise our comparative corpus. We can divide them in various groups. For example, on chronological base, you see pre-colonial and colonial. On there, let's say cultural affiliation or regional provenance, better said. So you have Maya codices. You have, I call them Southwestern because most of them are Mixtec codices, but seldom roll. So you one are not Mixtec. So I use this more general term and Central Mexican codices. Within this group, you can further subdivide them in other groups, such as the Borja group coming from the Eastern Nahuar area of Central Mexico. This cultural affiliation, this subdivision in subgroups has been made on the base of thematic and stylistic elements. Our attempt is to add a third dimension, the technological one. How this new dimension does fit with these divisions. So I have a pretty weird power point. Let me explain how it works. When you see a line, for example, here there is, it's not really clear in this one, but okay, a black line, it means that all the manuscript encircles, they share the same painting material. Maybe sometimes not identical, but very, very similar. So all the manuscripts analyzed so far are painted with digital carbon black. Color black is made with digital carbon and it was used for frame lines and to paint full painted areas, both black and gray. A diluted form was used for gray. Only two of the colonial manuscript, they use a European imported gray, a lead gray, which is obviously a problem of European origins. Now this, the fact that the carbon black was so thoroughly used, it's not a surprise because historical sources do talk in detail about this color that now was called clearly, which means black and soot. As you can see the Codex Florentinos translate this pine smoke, pine soot, and both Saugun and Hernandez do describe how they prepare this color by burning or burning pine wood under pottery pots so that the smoke would concentrate on their wall. And basically the same very similar work is used in the Maya area. Sibic means both soot, carbon lamp, lamp black, and ink as this beautiful glyph on this ink pot from HaSaoChanca wheel tomb in Tikal shows. Passing to the white backgrounds, most of the manuscripts have a white background, some of the colonial paper Codexes do not have white background, but as you can see white background can be divided into huge families, the calcium sulfate family and the calcium carbonate family, which in a certain degree do matches the cultural division, because as you can see most of Maya Codexes do have a calcium carbonate background and most of central and southwestern Mexican Codexes have a calcium sulfate background. There are exceptions, Codex Vaticanus B, which is central Mexican, has a calcium carbonate background and Codex Gorillia, which is Maya, has a calcium sulfate background. Within the calcium sulfate family, we have a two interesting subfamily, especially this one is interesting because Codex Sloden, because of the Gerberi Maya, do share a mixture of gypsum and dehydrated calcium sulfate, which is an hydrate. We cannot be sure if it is made on purpose or the two elements where naturally occurring in the same area. And Codex Selden, it's interesting because Codex Selden is painted on an older painting layer. So the underlying, the old one has a normal gypsum background, while the later one has this unique and hydrate and calcium carbonate background. Historical sources do speak about white colors in now what the T-Satul was gypsum and T-Satul was lime calcium carbonate. I am pretty convinced that the specific word for the material used on Codex was cimaltisat, which means shield gypsum. And it's what we call selenite or lapis specularis, which is gypsum in crystalline form. And Sagun explains how they prepared and it's interesting when it says, when it is to be painted on, as Alurinda, it was a kind of a surface to be painted. Passing to red colors. Again, here the correspondence with cultural distinction is neat. Old Central, Mexican and Southwestern Codexes do use cochineal, cochineal lakes, usually a mixture of cochineal and alum. And while the Maya Codexes do use a hematite, inorganic red. Probably recently they published a fragment of what seems to be a Codex from Washington, early classic, and they didn't do analysis, but they say that at microscopic observation, it shines as specular hematite, so they suppose it to be hematite. Within the central, the cochineal family, we have a, well, only Codex uses a mixture of cochineal and this is one example. They found a red dye, I can suppose it is achiotl, anato, big saurellena, but I cannot be sure. And more interesting, as you can see, Laudan Fajerva in Maya and Seldon and Bodley do share the use of a mixture, or better said a hybrid pigment, where cochineal is precipitated on an inorganic clay base. Then you have incolonial Codexes and in Vaticanus B, the use of cinnabar. Remember that Vaticanus B is weird. If you want, I will talk about it, but it's strange. But remember that cinnabar is only used in colonial time. I would say that Vaticanus B, part of it are colonial. So it's only used in colonial times. And in colonial times, they also use other reds, orcurs, gypsum, hematite, minimum. This is strange because many of these materials were used in pre-colonial Mesoamerica on other media, but we do not have evidence of use, or they use in Codex painting. Well, this is cochineal. I'm sure you all know this insect living on cactus, or puncia cactus. Well, described in historical sources. The name of the color was Tlapalli. In many books, you will find that it's not chestily, but it's wrong. Not chestily is the insect. While the color is Tlapalli, which is an important, very important word in Nahuatl, because it means red, but also means colored in general terms. And it was part of this very important diffrasism or dual metaphor in Tlapalli, the black and the red, which meant the knowledge, wisdom, but materialized by the very painting materials used. So Tlapalli is kind of an important notion in Nahuatl thinking. And you have this description of the use of cochineal lakes. There are exactly what we found on codices. Elum and cochineal, they call it Tlapalli, which means hard Tlapalli, and Codex Florentinos described it as an excellent painting material and with various different, the ashen one was probably a grayish hue. On the other hand, Maya codices that we saw, they use hematite, which is exactly the same painting material they're using on coieval mural paintings. On Codex Madrid we found a mixture of hematite and kaolin, and exactly the same mixture was used in Mayapan mural paintings in Yucatan in the same time. So there is a correspondence between the palette of Codex painters and mural painting in the Maya area, not in central Mexico. And as I said, we found cinnabar in colonial codices and cinnabar was used, obviously, in funerary rituals. So you see a photo here from the Red Queen of Palenque. Recently they found cinnabar in the Chichen Itza throne, so it was used to paint sculpture, but not to paint manuscripts. And last one, blue, most of analyzed codices do use Maya blue, which as you may know, it's a hybrid pigment composed by indigo and polygorskite. While it's weird again, it is too strange. No Maya blue were still under study, still we cannot understand perfectly how they were made. And as you can see, Codex Bodle and Selden do share a very interesting color, which is kind of a Maya blue produced in central Mexico using local materials, as if they were trying to reproduce the recipe of Maya blue, because they didn't have the clay polygorskite, which is only in Yucatan. And it is made of sepulite, which is an ok, and chomellina, which is another flower, Matlali in Nahuatl. Actually, you can see that Bodle is also in the family of Maya blue, but there is a single numeral dot painted with Maya blue. Probably it's a late repainting, it was vanished blue, and so someone painted that blue. Maya blue is the most studied painting material in Mesoamerica, composed by indigo and this inorganic base, which is polygorskite. We always say that this material was not mentioned in historical sources, but recently both Elodidu Pergarcia and Diana Magaloni proposed that this world, which is quite ambiguous, that shortly could be the Nahuatl name of Maya blue. And well, Maya blue it was used in the past, especially in the Maya area, at least since the epiclassic also in central Mexico. Here's here, Nastic claloc, oh yeah, from Templo Mayor painted with Maya blue. An example from Guadirco is to show you one of the limitation of our techniques. As you can see here, you have a blue god and you see this gray snake, they appear exactly the same to our instrument. They are Maya blue, both of them indigo and polygorskite. So obviously they had some kind of preparation technique, probably related with temperature, that allowed them to obtain different hues. Most of the Codex Madrid is gray, so you will find in many texts saying, oh it's simply deteriorated. It probably did, but it clear that they used, they made it on purpose. As you can see here, the gray is used to paint things that semantically we know that they were green. This is a jade ear flare etc. So we don't know how this gray color looked in the past, but probably it was something similar to green or semantically related to green. But yes, we cannot understand, based on our techniques, how they produce these different hues of colors. And then, as I told you with the identified comalina, which is interesting because this flower is described by Codex Florentinos and also Hernández spoke and speak about the comalina as another important blue flower used in central Mexico. The yellow family, it was not the last, it was wrong. As you can see, well these two Mayacodises, they do not use yellow. In most cases the other yellows are dyes, organic colors used as ingredients of lakes with alum in most case. Then we have a central Mexican group using hybrid pigments with clay and also Codex Natal, which is mixed, shares the same yellow. And then the big surprise, we found orpiment in Codex Cospi and then we started finding orpiment in various codices. Before our analysis it was thought that orpiment was imported in colonial times. And as you can see it was used also on many colonial manuscripts. Now we are sure that it's pre-colonial, it has been found later on in a Teotihuacan vessel, and a friend in Vancouver told me that we probably have evidence of orpiment in all Mac times in cave mural paintings in Mesoamerica. It's still confidential, but so it was another of those materials used in other media and which had a very restricted use in pre-colonial Mesoamerica and then it was used on colonial manuscripts. And then as usual in colonial times you have orcurs and other limonite, goitite, lots of orcurs used on manuscripts. As I told you most of these colors were organic flowers. These are the three most important yellow colors described by Saugun, Sacate Lascali, Socipalli and Quapastli. The botanic identification has been the object of a quite long debate, but probably Cosmos is pretty sure. We made analysis of samples that we produced and it's corresponded quite perfectly with the color that we have. And in historical sources Elodie Dupe Garcia was able to identify the world now what were referring to these hybrid clay organic pigments so they correspond to what we had in the codices and as I told you or pigment was our problem. It was used in these two very strictly related manuscripts and interestingly on only Verso of Codex Cospia, Recto of Codex Natal, which has the later parts of these codices. So probably in introduction of warpiment in a very specific region was a late phenomenon in early colonial times. In late pre-colonial time, sorry. And as I told you we found orcurs only in colonial manuscript while we have many examples of the use of orcurs in pre-colonial monuments such as in Tlaltecuhtli. I won't be speaking about greens because they are very complex basically they sum the complexity of yellows and blues because they are mixtures of the yellows and blues that I showed you and we have various now what terms again studied by Elodie which seems to describe precisely the painting materials we found in our manuscripts. And lastly, not surprisingly, colonial codices have the ink. So European inks used to write alphabetic writing. Now if I try to sum up all this, it looks a bit confused, but still there are some patterns that can be meaningful pattern that can be discussed. First of all, basically when you see many lines it means that there are some kind of threshold of borders separating different technological traditions. Here all these lines do separate Maya codices from all the other codices. Basically Maya painters use the very restricted palette for colors mainly of inorganics. The only organic we know so far is the organic component of Maya blue and it is precisely the same palette they were using in Coeval mural painting. This is interesting because we know that in classic times Maya painters used a huge palette as in Bonampac. They had lots of colors and we know that the scribes who made the Madrid Codex were had strong interaction with central Mexican scribe. They were translating astronomical almanacs, central Mexican astronomical almanacs into Maya format. So we cannot imagine that the Mayas were not able to produce a so diverse palette as the one used in central Mexico. This is a problem of cultural selection. They were not interested in having other colors, all the other yellows, oranges. We know that these four colors have important directional symbol. So probably there is some cultural reason that makes you wonder when we're thinking in a quite diffusionist mode. You think there was interaction so they must have shared technological knowledge. Probably they did but they not always assumed that knowledge. If they were not interested in using that, they did not. So in this case manuscripts and mural painting are using exactly the same palette. On the other hand in the central and southwestern Mexican areas the situation is completely different. First let me very rapidly show you that for example you see the Codex Seldon and Codex Bodle do share many lines. They share many materials. They have a very strong stylistic similarity. I think this is a technological tradition specific of the Tilantongo half the pack area in the Misteka. They come from two neighboring pueblos. So I think this is the hint towards specific technological tradition. Interestingly Codex Natal proceed from the very same kingdom of Tilantongo but it shares lots of technological element with central Mexican with Borja group codexes and it is also matched by stylistic elements. Codex Natal tells mixtec histories but in a very Nawa style and palette for some reason this codex is kind of in between. Codex Colombino stands alone among mixtec codexes and it comes from the coast of the Misteka. So again probably a regional reason for this standing alone. If we go to the Borja group it's interesting as you can see well this is obvious. Vatican B is unique. It's weird. It's strange. We are still working on it. We will publish it soon hopefully soon but Elodie Duperre when I first told her of this project she told me you will see codex Vaticanus which is the awful pre-colonial codex. There's always been said that there's an awful style. She always said that would be the most interesting and she was right because incredibly complex but living is a side as you can see codex Loewden called the Fajerva in Maya. They do share many common elements including that very unique background and this is interesting because they also share stylistic element. They are so similar that could have been painted in the same workshop and also you can see the use of this bar and dot. It's not bar and dot numeral system but something that similar to the bar and dot numeral system. They use or pigment etc. So there is a long debate on the area from which they come probably they come from the Tehuacan area. It's one of the possibilities. So I think that this palette was typical of the Tehuacan region. So we have a subgroup in the Borja group that is defined on both thematic and stylistic and now we can add technological elements. On the other side the other subgroup of the Borja group is represented by Codex Borja. Codex Borja is incredible because it has the simplest palette among all the analyzed codices. All of them are organic, no minerals at all, only clays used in hybrid pigment. I would say I cannot let's say I cannot publish it but if you ask me I would say that this is the classic palette. Codex Borja is neat, few colors, the basic ones, is one of the stylistically more important codices probably painted in the Cholula area. I would say that this is a representation, a materialization of the most classic central Mexican palette. So we have these two groups and Codex Cospi is extremely interesting because its rectal was painted in a style very similar to Codex Borja with an almost identical palette probably in the Cholula area and then it was moved probably to the toward the Tehuacan region where it was painted on the other side by a local painter as you can see using the same painting very similar thematic stuff but also using the local palette with or pigment etc. So as I told you I'm studying the biography of Codex Cospi. We now know that he arrived in Bologna on March 1533. We have all its history documented probably we can add an earlier step of its traveling life so probably hit this object travel from Central Mexico to well from the Cholula area from to Tehuacan. Now as I said the most distinguishing element of Central Mexican and Southwestern codices is the use of organic colors. They do not use all these ochres and other inorganic element that they were using on mural painting. So why? Why they obviously decided to avoid all that ochres for example that were really useful in terms of obtaining different color use. I think that there must be again a cultural reason something that is related with the emic emic I don't know emic perception of the materiality of this of the manuscript. And so it's the you pretty obvious if you work on Mesoamerican stuff that flowers were important. The use of flowers was was noted by Francisco Friar Motolinia who as you see they say Indian paintings produce many colors with flowers and when they want to change color they used to clean the brush in their mouth that you cannot do with or pigment because arsenic tastes so fine. I actually don't know but this flower on the painting of the pintora is really interesting and you can see here a classic let's say a very famous expression of chanting you know the flowery world was the expression used to as you can see in this de-phrase means such it in quick cut the flower the chant you know the flowery world was an expression to refer to poetic to elegant ways of speech and if you look at now a poetry you have many examples really interesting for example from the cantares mexicanos my songs are greening my world fruit sprouts so they're always this let's say mingling between chanting colors and emission of fragrance of brilliance and organic colors are extremely brilliant bright colors so I think that this brilliance what painters were looking for and for example with flowers you paint things with songs you give them color you see again oh and this is interesting because as jewel mats shop with jade and emerald sunray the green place flower songs are radiating green they're shining so this shine coming out from the pages is probably the material aspect they were looking at okay you have other examples I won't go in detail but this emission of fragrance that is an emission of song I think that we can save being careful but in some way the use of this painting material made that pictorial manuscript were perceived as if they were embodying the flowery matter of chant and so it has something to do with the performance of public performance of this manuscript chanting will go up tells us that they put them on walls and used to chant the manuscript etc all this cultural universe had a change in early colonial times all these lines it's are saying that in colonial times something very new happened and it is the use of inorganic colors so they started using Cinnabar ochre's hematite and lots of inorganic color probably this trend already started in late pre-colonial time where they introduced opiment but obviously this early colonial material experimentation as I like to call it was really strong in this in colonial times you have different timings you have when you have a manuscript from peripheral areas such as southern role which is late 16th century is painted with a typically pre-panic palette kind of colonial back back water there but in central Mexico what is beautiful as you can see the timing of change so in the 1530s they probably they painted Codex Borbonicus and you can see that it's colonial by many aspect including the fact that they left space for glosses in many pages but the palette is completely pre-colonial it has no single strange color so it's from a material point of view is completely traditional ten years after oh sorry I was wrong ten years after the painters that were from Codex Mendoza introduced just a few I wish we spot just a single point with a lead gray in the pictorial part of the codex they obviously use European ink on there but these red glosses made with cinnabar so a local material but not used in pre-colonial time so this is the start of this manuscript embodies the colonial material encounter in some way in my idea and then a few decades later toward the middle and the second half of 16th century you have lots of inorganic material used in images that as you can see they are changing their function that they are beginning they are something like illustration of tax so there is a change in the structure of these objects they are the more and more similar to European books with the tax this is a billing bilingual tax etc and so I think that this early colonial material experimentation is made possible by the fact that scribes are in some way facing a new context of production and performance of things that before the conquest were chanting manuscript chanting objects and now are something like books as we perceive them so in some way to face the challenge of picture writing in the turmoil of colonial world they had this opportunity of widening their palette using inorganic elements both local and European and ironically this was happening while Europeans were discovering Mesoamerican organic colors this is Cochiniel 1565 Paolo Veronesi in Italy is painting with Mesoamerican Cochiniel this has been analyzed not by us so it's a moment of exchange of painting materials and well this is of the global circulation of those objects I showed you and also many painting materials but this is another story thank you are you open to taking some questions? yeah yeah sure thank you so much for really fascinating talk and I think you're kind of hinting at it perhaps at the end but you said that Cochiniel is not in any of the colonial no yes yes it is it is it is it is in the colonial manuscript it is they simply add to Cochiniel not in the same painting area but they start painting that areas not only with Cochiniel but also with Amatite, Minium, etc but they they use Cochiniel yeah yeah yeah they continue I just understood that I was thinking that would be no no no that would be yeah surprising because although there was an important colonial production of Cochiniel both in Oaxaca and various regions but adding to yeah they're adding to their palette all these inorganic mineral pigments and your thought is just that because of this sort of really big shift well I cannot say I'm trying to to figure out why they they seem to break these very important rules norms that they had in precolonial times made they they totally ignored a palette they used in mural painting so they perfectly knew well the argument that you're making that flowering speech yeah yes is the discursive thing that they're creating yeah it seems to me that that that is very powerfully made by this demonstration of the yeah yeah and and I think that my feeling the first time that I opened an original and I said wow like that wow is is what they were trying to produce the the the manuscript just shining emitting something I didn't know what it was I always said wow the first time now kind of thinking that what is that there's more subtle shading in the volcanic yeah yeah yeah so you get more yeah sure yeah it's actually look more lively yeah and it's vital just let me add to what you are saying usually when you read works on stylistic studies of painting they always say that in precolonial time they only used flat washes and in early colonial time they start and do a shading which is not true you can see various instances of volume rendering in Mesoamerican art but what's interesting is that in in some codices for example in Codex Borja you can see that they were using not flat washes not to represent volume but to present to represent I do say in English iridescence the color iridescence the shining of of feathers for example now strange because the that color in color is borja looks brown but it was a green it's a complex color we have but it's obviously green and it's clear they were trying to represent this this brilliance of feathers and if you look at Codex Mendoza they are trying to represent in a weird way the same effect on greenstone so they they were they were not flat flat washes but they were not only used to represent volume they were interested in these properties of matter or visual properties of matter that I think it's linked with the flower in matter you mentioned song and color and there is a recent interest in the physiology of some people who hear sounds and see colors but under I can't imagine you have not heard this but under drugs which for example they did the mescal from peyote or the LSD from morning which were used in Mesoamerica you might over millennia develop technologies of producing music which is going to create color within the minds of people who are high or so and in some populations perhaps Canadian populations perhaps this is a normal state it could be I don't know the work you're mentioning obviously it could be we have even various representation in synesthesia is a cognitive crossing over yeah even those poetic references synesthesia because they they're taking the songs that color is their example so it can probably be related with some drug consumption but I think there is a very important element of now aesthetics if you if you if you think aesthetics in a very basic way as attributing value to sensation to perception in our world this process was very complex when you read now a poetry you see that this adding layers of values of even moral values to sense sensorial perception is well in Codex Vatican in Codex in the bonuses there is nine winged playing a musical instrument and chanting while some guys are eating mushrooms and the music they emit that make that the sun rise so I was wondering if you have evidence of maintenance or refreshing oh yeah changing chemistry yeah yeah we have lots of them so we have on one side repaintings of whole codices codex seldom for example is completely repainted we have evidence of repainting of specific parts of codices for cultural reason they were changing part of calendars probably when the codex was moving from an area to another one codex but he kind of be as a very clear occurrence of this kind you have I don't know if we say it in English in late in his pentimenty when they painted something and and they usually use a white calcium carbonate layer to delete what they painted yeah and then you have cases such as codex bodily where probably this hybrid comellina sepulite paint was not very good so it flaked out and someone repainted some numeral dots with maya blue in ancient times obviously and then you have the sad discovery we did codex borja is heavily repainted in modern times with prussian blue yeah when we discover that I had the the the the nightmare of going to the guy at the Vatican library and saying your manuscript has prussian blue probably because it was on blue and on yellow probably because this hybrid pigment they have this clayish component are quite hard and so they tend to I do say deflake or yeah yeah flake off and so someone probably restored so they they told me they are going to make archival research at the Vatican to see if France early or some or the concert or the old conservator tried to so we have various evidence of and it is not my work but a colleague Ludo Sniders is working on codex selden on a page that has been graded in the 50s and he was able with multispect multispectral camera to see the underlying layer just the horizontal lines and some outline of the figures but at least it said us that the codex that is under there was a typical mystic courtesies read in bustrophedon fashion with the figures typically historical mystic courtesies so it's interesting but it's very hard to see that layer are you contributing to the volume that came out of the conference yes yes so there was a conference at the botlean library last June that we were part of where I saw the first version of this amazing research and that conference volume will include work by Ludo his work as well as like a wide array of really quite quite cutting-edge things on color and manuscript and even better work yeah yeah I know it's work and and Ludo also when we were at the botlean working on the course looking at them he took photos of the cover covered at selden he went home and tried to play with Photoshop and then he sent back as a look at these photos just he enhanced the contrast and you have all the jaguar spots on the cover yes yeah it is the head of the of the jaguar we thought it was another kind of skin we see all the jaguar pelting in classic iconography of the Maya courtesies but there that's the original jaguar other courtesies have a european sealed cover codex cospi is nice in bulanicus it has a parchment cover written that with an inscription say that it was a natale christmas gift given in the 17th century of this chinese book and then they deleted chinese and they were mexican revgm is of value okay okay any questions i want to ask you to join me in thanking our speaker for sharing this room interesting research thank you thank you