Medieval World
The Mixtec Manuscript Painters (1200–1520)
Mixtec Manuscript manuscript painters.
The Mixtec manuscript painters are not one named artist but the tlacuiloque of the Ñuu Savi kingdoms — Tilantongo and its kin — who painted screenfold books on deerskin in the centuries before the Spanish conquest. The dates here bracket that manuscript age, not a life. Their pages are both picture and writing: day-names, place-signs, and elaborately costumed lords record genealogy, conquest, and origin. The Codex Zouche-Nuttall (British Museum) carries the history of Lord 8 Deer Jaguar Claw; the Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I (Vienna) opens the sacred narrative of ancestors and the origin tree.
Elizabeth Hill Boone's Stories in Red and Black is the modern key to this art: Mixtec (and related Mesoamerican) painting is a literacy, not a mere illustration of some lost alphabetic text. Figures walk in profile on a gessoed hide; red and black, turquoise and yellow, name-glyphs and place-signs do the work of sentences. The screenfold is read by turning, like a map that is also a chronicle.
No painter signed a page. Museums attribute the surviving pre-conquest Mixtec books to court workshops of the Mixteca, a collective as honest as the Maya vase painters or the Benin guild.
The words the record keeps using: legible, genealogical, vivid, courtly, narrative, codical.
At a glance
- Lived 1200–1520
- Origin Mixtec (Ñuu Savi, Tilantongo and related kingdoms)
- Worked in Tilantongo (Mixtec Ñuu Tnoo)
- Era Medieval World
- Movements Mixtec Manuscript Painting
- Mediums Illumination on vellum
- Techniques Manuscript illumination
Works in the archive
- Codex Zouche-Nuttall, page 20, 1400 (British Museum, London)
A page from the Codex Zouche-Nuttall: processions of costumed Mixtec figures, temple interiors, and place-signs painted on gessoed hide. The book is a principal pictorial history of Lord 8 Deer Jaguar Claw and the… - Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I, 1400 (Austrian National Library, Vienna)
The Codex Vindobonensis, a Mixtec origin and ritual book: the famous sacred tree and flanking rows of named ancestors painted on hide. Boone and Mixtec scholarship read it as cosmogony and genealogy, not as a European… - Codex Zouche-Nuttall, page 75, 1400 (British Museum, London)
Page 75 of the Zouche-Nuttall: Mixtec lords on a water band above a turquoise field of aquatic creatures — crocodilian, shell, and serpent forms — a named place or crossing in the historical narrative. The page shows…
What was said
Boone argues that Mixtec painting in red and black is a form of writing: genealogy, place, and date are carried by the picture itself, not by a lost alphabetic caption.
The Codex Zouche-Nuttall is read as a pictorial history of Mixtec dynasty, including the career of Lord 8 Deer Jaguar Claw, painted for a court that already knew how to read place-signs and day-names.
Painters prepared deerskin with lime gesso and laid mineral colors inside a black outline, folding the strip into a screenfold that is opened section by section.
What would The Mixtec Manuscript Painters make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after The Mixtec Manuscript Painters", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with The Mixtec Manuscript Painters · Keep a life moment the way The Mixtec Manuscript Painters would · Pictures made after The Mixtec Manuscript Painters