The Lienzo de Tlaxcala Remade with Byron Hamann

In this Research and Academic Program lecture, Byron Hamann ( Independent Scholar, Burlington, Iowa / Michael Ann Holly Fellow) explores how in 1552, as part of preparations for sending an embassy across the ocean to Spain, the Nahua city council of Tlaxcala commissioned a painting showing how Tlaxcalan warriors overthrew the Aztec Empire (with a little help from Hernán Cortés). The object now known as the Lienzo de Tlaxcala was the result. A massive painted cloth (some 5m by 2.5m), covered with a grid of narrative scenes, this pictorial history would become the most influential indigenous retelling of the story of the fall of Mexico-Tenochtitlán. The scenes covering its surface were continually reinterpreted and remediated across the following centuries; this talk will share what I have learned about that history of remediations.

Presented in person in the Clark auditorium. A 5 pm reception in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event.

Image: Digital recreation (by Byron Ellsworth Hamann for The Mesolore Project in 2010) of the 1552 Lienzo de Tlaxcala, based on lithographs printed in 1892 which were in turn based on 1860s tracings of the now-lost painted cloth.