7. Memory: Remembering Biodiversity

Braddock, Alan C.

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7. Memory: Remembering Biodiversity

Alan C. Braddock

Implication: An Ecocritical Dictionary for Art History

This chapter examines a sixteenth-century engraving by the Franciscan monk Diego de Valadés (1533–1582) representing the Great Chain of Being...

Author

Alan C. Braddock

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00341.8

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23305

Chapter subject tags:EcocriticismEcology in artNatural History--Latin AmericanIndigenous peoples--ReligionBiodiversityValadés, Diego, 1533-

7. Memory: Remembering Biodiversity

memory, n.
I. 1. An act of commemoration, esp. of the dead; = commemoration n. 2b. Obsolete.
I. 2. a. The action of remembering; recollection, remembrance. Now chiefly in from memory (also by memory), in memory.
I. 2. b. An act or instance of remembrance; a representation in the memory, a recollection.

art of memory, n. [after post-classical Latin ars memoriae, memoriae ars, frequent in titles of works on mnemonics in the late 15th and early 16th centuries] Mnemonics; a system of mnemonic devices.

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THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING

This chapter examines a sixteenth-century engraving by the Franciscan monk Diego de Valadés (1533–1582) representing the Great Chain of Being, a cosmic vision of hierarchical order in nature (fig. 1). Rooted in Western classical principles going back to Plato and Aristotle, such imagery embodied ancient European beliefs about nature as a coherent system of life-forms arranged on a sliding scale, or scala naturae, according to varying levels of animation and intelligence. In medieval Europe, this tiered scheme became imbued with religious assumptions about divine creation, dictating that all life originated with God in perfect plenitude for eternity, anthropocentrically ranked with human beings at the top of the earthly realm, just beneath Heaven. Accordingly, any contradictory notions of change, disruption, or realignment constituted heresy. Valadés’s engraving envisioned important linkages across categories—including the image of a literal chain connecting the various echelons of being—but its ranked theological structure seems to stand in direct contrast to modern ecology’s understanding of nature as intrinsically dynamic and mutable. As both picture and concept, The Great Chain of Being apparently provides a foil to the more fluid sense of interconnection and change that characterizes ecological thought today. And yet, the engraving by Valadés reveals subtle artistic signs of environmental complexity arising from his particular historical circumstances and memories, suggesting the irrepressible power of ecology—and even art of the past—to challenge entrenched ideas. Specifically, the work points to the implication of Europe and America, Old World and “New,” in an emerging imperium of both Christianity and global biodiversity.1 The bibliography on Valadés is large and growing. An especially good critical biography appears in Pauline Moffitt Watts, “Hieroglyphs of Conversion: Alien Discourses in Diego Valadés’s Rhetorica Christiana,” in Gli ordini religiosi mendicanti, tradizione e dissenso (Pistoia, Italy: Centro riviste della Provincia romana, 1992), 405–33. See also Gerardo Ramírez Vidal, El arte de la memoria en la “Rhetorica Christiana” de fray Diego Valadés (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2016); Carmen José Alejos-Grau, Diego Valadés, educador de la Nueva España: Ideas pedagógicas de la “Rhetorica Christiana” (1579) (Pamplona, Spain: Ediciones Eunate, 1996); Don Paul Abbott, “Diego Valadés: An Ancient Rhetoric in a New World,” in Rhetoric in the New World: Rhetorical Theory and Practice in Colonial Spanish America (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 41–59; Esteban J. Palomera, Fray Diego Valadés, o.f.m.: Evangelizador humanista de la Nueva España; el hombre, su época y su obra (Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana, Departamento de Historia, 1988); and Francisco de la Maza, Fray Diego Valadés: Escritor y grabador franciscano del siglo XVI (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 1945). For recent sources specifically discussing his engraving of the Great Chain of Being, see Laura Elaine Leaper, “Time, Memory, and Ritual: Deciphering Visual Rhetoric in Diego Valadés’s Rhetorica Christiana” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2012), 38, 144–45; and Lina Bolzoni, “Mexican Nature in Diego Valadés’ Rhetorica Christiana (1579),” Studies in the History of Art 69 (2008): 127–41. On the Great Chain of Being as a concept, see Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936); and Mark L. Brake, “The Great Chain of Being,” in Revolution in Science: How Galileo and Darwin Changed Our World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 89–102.

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Description: The Great Chain of Being by Valadés, Diego

Fig. 1. Diego de Valadés (Didacus Valdes), The Great Chain of Being. Engraved illustration in Rhetorica Christiana (Perugia, 1579), Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

At the top of the image, in a scene of Heaven set above clouds, we see the Holy Trinity of God the Father in majesty with Christ and the Holy Spirit, accompanied by the Virgin Mary praying at left. God’s right hand holds the chain, or vinculum, linking Him to the various ranked categories of creation that descend below. His left hand holds the orb of the universe, surmounted by an imperial Christian cross, indicating the infinite scope of His power and authority, as confirmed by the surrounding Latin inscription, which reads, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, and apart from me there is no god, and all the gods of other nations are demons.”2 My translation. Two orders of angels also inhabit the celestial sphere, not counting the chute of falling angels at right, expelled from Heaven as punishment for sin. Below the heavenly host of angels, the earthly sphere appears in clearly demarcated strata, with human beings closest to Heaven, followed by birds, sea creatures, quadrupeds, and flora. Beneath them resides a row of orbs containing assorted cosmic images that divide Earth from Hell below, where Satan sits amid flames and demons torturing the damned.

As a whole, the engraving visualizes a top-down ordering scheme that specifically recalls statements in Aristotle’s History of Animals (Historia Animalium; ca. 350 CE), book 8: “Nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life. . . . Throughout the entire animal scale there is a graduated differentiation in amount of vitality and capacity for motion.”3 Aristotle, History of Animals, trans. A. W. Thompson, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 922. During the early medieval period, Aristotle’s hierarchical scale was Christianized by authors such as Macrobius (early fifth century), who offered this interpretation in his Commentary on the Dream of Scipio (Somnium Scipionis): “Since all things follow in continuous succession, degenerating in sequence to the very bottom of the series, the attentive observer will discover a connection of parts from the Supreme God down to the last dregs of things, mutually linked together and without a break; and this is Homer’s golden chain, which God, he says, bade hang down from heaven to earth.”4 Macrobius, quoted in Lovejoy, Great Chain of Being, 63. In referring to “Homer’s golden chain,” Macrobius Christianized a passage in The Iliad (book 8, paragraph 1), in which Zeus asserts his authority among the Olympian gods by saying, “Make fast from heaven a chain of gold, and lay hold of it, all you gods and all you goddesses; yet you could not drag to earth out of heaven Zeus the counselor most high, not even though you labored mightily. But whenever I was really minded to pull with all my heart, then with earth itself I would draw it up and with the sea as well; and the rope I would then bind around a peak of Olympus and all those things would hang in space. By so much do I surpass gods and surpass men.” Homer, Iliad, vol. 1, trans. A. T. Murray, rev. William F. Wyatt, Loeb Classical Library 170 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1924), 351–53.

The Great Chain of Being appeared in a treatise on Christian oratory titled Rhetorica Christiana (1579), which Valadés wrote and designed to assist Franciscan missionaries in converting Indigenous people in Mexico to Christianity. As explained in the subtitle and frontispiece, the book was “adapted for the use of lecturing and preaching using examples taken from histories of the Indians, from which, in addition to doctrine, the reader will obtain great enjoyment.”5 Didacus Valdes (Diego de Valadés), Rhetorica Christiana: Ad concionandi, et orandi vsum accommodata, vtriusq[ue] facultatis exemplis suo loco insertis; quae quidem, ex Indorum maximè deprompta sunt historiis; unde praeter doctrinam, sum[m]a quoque delectatio comparabitur (Perugia: Apud Petrumiacobum Petrutium, 1579). My translation of the subtitle. Based on memories of his own missionary experience preaching to Mexica (Aztec), Chichimeca, and other Indigenous communities in New Spain during the 1550s and 1560s, Valadés composed, illustrated, and published the book in Italy while on an extended European sojourn near the end of his life.6 On the missionary experience of Valadés, see Watts, “Hieroglyphs of Conversion,” 407–11.

In the early modern period, Europeans often invoked the Great Chain of Being to affirm and naturalize the “highness,” or earthly power, of popes, kings, and aristocrats by divine right. Accordingly, Valadés complemented his illustration of that concept with others in Rhetorica Christiana showing the “Hierarchia Ecclesiastica” (Ecclesiastical Hierarchy) and “Hierarchia Temporalis” (Temporal Hierarchy), topped by the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, respectively (fig. 2). Beneath the latter worldly authority can be seen, in descending order, images of kings (Rex), viceroy (Vice Rex), governor (Gubernator), auditor (Auditor), judge (Iudex), provost (Prepositus), commander or magistrate (Pretor), family father (Pater Familias), and mother (Mater). Below this terrestrial chain of command, in an area analogous to Hell, violators suffer the excruciating consequences of disobedience.

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Description: Hierarchia Temporalis by Valadés, Diego

Fig. 2. Diego de Valadés (Didacus Valdes), Hierarchia Temporalis. Engraved illustration in Rhetorica Christiana (Perugia, 1579), Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

A similar political logic upheld other European colonial regimes during the period, as demonstrated in this statement by Sir Walter Raleigh (1554–1618), a prominent Elizabethan poet and explorer who proudly served the English monarchy in North America:

For that infinite wisdome of god, which hath distinguished his Angells by degrees: which hath given greater and lesse light and beauty, to Heavenly bodies: which hath made differences betweene beasts and birds: created the Eagle and the Flye, the Cedar and the Shrub: and among stones, given the fairest tincture to the Ruby, and the quickest light to the Diamond; hath also ordained Kings, Dukes or Leaders of the people, Magistrates, Judges, and other degrees among men.7 Sir Walter Raleigh, The History of the World in Five Books (London: Printed for Walter Burke, 1614), [xviii–xix].

With so much earthly authority at stake, it’s no wonder the Great Chain of Being enjoyed such long duration as a “natural” ordering principle in European science, politics, and culture.

The ancient idea of the Great Chain of Being would retain some currency in European and Euro-American art and thought until the nineteenth century, when the discovery of extinction and new understanding of dynamic change in nature eventually made it obsolete (except in orthodox religious circles), giving rise to the modern concept of “ecology.” Viewed against this historical trajectory, Valadés’s sixteenth-century engraving seems to picture a static, premodern ideal of divine order and hierarchy. The closer we look at the artist and his engraving, however, the more complex and dynamic the image becomes. Moreover, when considered in relation to other illustrations in Rhetorica Christiana, the art of Valadés appears even more interesting as a visual affirmation of Indigenous culture and cosmopolitan environmental knowledge.8 On extinction and the collapse of the Great Chain of Being, see Mark V. Barrow Jr., Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 15–46.

MESTIZO MNEMONICS

It is important to note a salient biographical fact about Valadés: he was a mestizo, the son of a Spanish conquistador father and an Indigenous mother of the Tlaxcalan people, who had allied with Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) in defeating the Mexica. Born in 1533, barely more than a decade after the conquest of Mexico began in 1519, Valadés received a humanist religious education in Spanish colonial schools, beginning at the School of San Francisco in Mexico City, an institution dedicated to teaching Catholic doctrine, Latin, and European classics to naturales, or Indigenous people. The school was founded by Pedro de Gante (1480–1572), a lay brother from Flanders who had arrived with the first Franciscan missionaries in New Spain. Valadés probably received further education and ordination as a Franciscan at the Colegio de Santa Cruz, also in Mexico City, but no record of this survives. Scarce documentation about the life of Valadés has led some scholars to question his mestizo status, but most historians accept his mixed ancestry, citing the authority of Agustín de Vetancurt (1620–1700), an eminent seventeenth-century Franciscan chronicler who described Valadés as a “son of this province of the Holy Gospel and of a native of Tlaxcala” (hijo de esta provincia del Santo Evangelio y natural de Tlaxcala).9 Agustín de Vetancurt, Chronica de la Provincia del Santo Evangelio de México: Quarta parte del Teatro Mexicano de los successos religiosos (Mexico City, 1697), quoted in Palomera, Fray Diego Valadés, 82. For other affirmations of the mestizo status of Valadés, see Bolzoni, “Mexican Nature,” 132; Abbott, “Diego Valadés,” 42; and Kathleen Ann Meyers, “Aztec Dance along the Ruta de Cortés: A Search for New Identities,” Hispanófila, no. 171 (June 2017): 172. Jaime Lara expresses uncertainty about the identity of Valadés in Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 63. In her dissertation, Laura Elaine Leaper attempts to challenge the artist’s mestizidad by citing the lack of a clear published statement by him. Her arguments are unconvincing, however, because they fail to consider the subtle realities of mixed ancestry in the context of European racism and institutional prohibitions imposed by Montúfar in 1555 against Indigenous education (see p. X), which undoubtedly forced those mestizos who were already educated and ordained to be very discreet about their identity. See Leaper, “Time, Memory and Ritual,” 62. More convincing is Watts, who suggests (following Palomera) that Valadés was “surreptitiously ordained” in the Franciscan order and therefore could only broach his identity in an “oblique and masked” manner. Watts, “Hieroglyphs of Conversion,” 409, 410.

Compelling visual evidence of a cosmopolitan, transcultural perspective appears in numerous illustrations Valadés created for Rhetorica Christiana. For example, one elaborate engraving depicts the Mexica calendar carefully correlated with the European Julian calendar, translating Indigenous pictographs and names identifying months, days, and other elements (fig. 3).10 For discussion of Valadés’s illustration of the Mexica calendar in Rhetorica Christiana, see Bolzoni, “Mexican Nature,” 132, 134; and Watts, “Hieroglyphs of Conversion,” 421. Having dedicated his book to the reigning Pope Gregory XIII (Ugo Boncompagni, 1502–1585), Valadés here adroitly appealed to the pontiff’s well-known interest in calendar reform, which would culminate in the Gregorian calendar adopted by the Catholic Church and much of Europe beginning in 1582. At the same time, this illustration confirmed the precision, complexity, and intelligence of Indigenous mnemonic systems for tracking seasonal change through careful observation of earthly cycles. As several scholars have observed, Valadés’s calendrical interest participated in a broader Renaissance discourse of the ars memoriae, or the art of memory (also sometimes called mnemotechnics), which coincided with a proliferation of published texts owing to the emergence of the printing press and mechanical typography. According to the historian Pauline Moffitt Watts, “For Valadés, the culminating evidence that the Indians possess the arts of artificial memory lies in their calendar,” which his engraving presents as a sophisticated achievement to be admired. As Watts says, it allowed Indigenous Mexicans “to mark time in daily, weekly, monthly, and annual increments. This they would not have been able to do, according to Valadés, had they not understood the dynamics of ‘images’ and ‘places’ upon which artificial memory systems are based.”11 Watts, “Hieroglyphs of Conversion,” 421. On the art of memory, see the classic study by Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (1966; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); the reference to “mnemotechnics” appears on page 4.

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Description: Aztec Calendar by Valadés, Diego

Fig. 3. Diego de Valadés (Didacus Valdes), Aztec Calendar. Engraved illustration in Rhetorica Christiana (Perugia, 1579), Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

Other illustrations in Rhetorica Christiana were calculated more explicitly to serve the project of missionary education and conversion, as in the engraved alphabets using visual and phonetic cues to help Native subjects learn to read and understand Christian doctrine. Valadés strategically leveraged existing pictographic communication skills among Indigenous Mexicans while once again tapping into contemporary European fascination with mnemonic arts. As he wrote in Rhetorica Christiana:

Images are certainly forms and signs and representation of those things which we wish to remember. It is necessary that we arrange these things, such as the genus of horses, lions, books, stones, in certain places. For places are like writing tables or leaves of paper. The images are like letters, the disposition and location of the images is like writing, and speaking is like reading. . . . [The Indians] make their will known to each other through certain forms and images which they are accustomed to place on panels of silk and paper sheets made from the leaves of trees. This custom in the reckoning of their accounts continues to this present day, not only among those ignorant of how to read and write but also among those capable of reading and writing correctly.12 Valadés, Rhetorica Christiana, 90, 93, quoted and translated in Watts, “Hieroglyphs of Conversion,” 418, 419.

Discussing this remarkable passage as a defense of Indigenous skills of visual communication and memory, Watts has noted how Valadés also thereby engaged with yet another prevailing current of European research—ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics—following the Renaissance rediscovery of Hieroglyphica, a fifth-century treatise on the subject attributed to an author named Horapollo. In effect, Valadés presented Indigenous visual practices as a comparative form of hieroglyphics worthy of understanding and preservation.13 Watts, “Hieroglyphs of Conversion,” 418–22. Valadés cites Horapollo explicitly in Rhetorica Christiana, 93, saying, “They [Indigenous Mexicans] have this in common with the Egyptians who also fashioned meaning in the same way through figures, designating speed by a hawk, vigilance through a crocodile, authority by a lion. Concerning such designations see Horapollo’s De literis hieroglyphicis.” On Horapollo and the Renaissance rediscovery of Egyptian hieroglyphs, see Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

A prominent colonial example of Indigenous pictorial art that Valadés probably knew was the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, a postconquest painting on textile (lienzo) about sixteen feet high that was once displayed in the city hall of his native city. Known through a modern reconstruction of the lost sixteenth-century original (fig. 4), the Lienzo de Tlaxcala commemorated the Tlaxcalan-Spanish alliance and their military conquest of the Mexica. More than just a historical document, it depicted the Tlaxcalans as good subjects of the Spanish crown, reaffirming privileges earned through their alliance. Accordingly, the upper register of the painting mixed Mesoamerican and European artistic styles by showing the two parties in characteristic dress, with Indigenous warriors in profile and the Spaniards in three-quarter perspective, gathered together in a large assembly around a Christian cross. Dozens of additional vignettes appear in the squares below, representing various scenes that indicate how the alliance defeated the Mexica. As the scholar Byron Ellsworth Hamann has observed, together these images offered “an account of the ‘Conquest of Mexico’ from a Native American point of view.” The Lienzo de Tlaxcala also testified to the important role of pictorial arts in communicating a cross-cultural vision of orderly interaction and moral rectitude.14 Byron Ellsworth Hamann, “Object, Image, Cleverness: The Lienzo de Tlaxcala,” Art History 36, no. 3 (2013): 518. For a discussion of Valadés and his general familiarity with the lienzo form, see Louise M. Burkhart, Elizabeth Hill Boone, and David Tavárez, “The Atzaqualco Catechism and Colonial Mexican Catechismal Pictography,” in Painted Words: Nahua Catholicism, Politics, and Memory in the Atzaqualco Pictorial Catechism, Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology Studies Series 39 (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2017), 14, 16–17. On the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, see Burkhart, Boone, and Tavárez, “Atzaqualco Catechism,” 101, 104, 130, 135; Guadalupe Alemán Ramírez, ed., Lienzo de Tlaxcala: Códice histórico del siglo XVI (Tlaxcala, Mexico: Gobierno del Estado, 2016); and Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Victors and Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico (Boston: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 123–26.

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Description: Digital reconstruction of the now lost Lienzo de Tlaxcala

Fig. 4. Digital reconstruction of the now lost Lienzo de Tlaxcala, ca. 1552. Original: painted cotton cloth, approx. 6 ft. 6 in. × 16 ft. 4 1/2 in. (2 × 5 m). Reconstruction by Byron Ellsworth Hamann

Franciscan missionaries astutely recognized the power of visual imagery in the lienzo medium as a mnemonic tool of education, indoctrination, and conversion—a fact acknowledged and celebrated by Valadés repeatedly in Rhetorica Christiana. For example, in an allegory of the Franciscan mission in New Spain, Valadés remembered and honored his former teacher Pedro de Gante, who is shown in a detail at the upper left instructing Indigenous pupils by pointing with a stick to pictographic images on a lienzo (fig. 5). This detail, along with an analogous vignette at the top right of the engraving, clearly reveals the textile nature of the lienzo medium by showing it in each case hanging from a rod, with strands of yarn protruding from either end and a lacy fringe extending downward from its bottom edge. A Latin caption below the Indigenous pupils reads Discunt omnia, or “They learn all things.” Another engraving represents an unidentified Franciscan friar gesturing with a similar baton toward a series of biblical images, lecturing like an art historian in a church interior crowded with attentive Native Americans in classical garb (fig. 6). As Valadés explained in a different passage of his treatise, “In the sacred assemblies they hold among the Indians, the religious men use unusual and amazing figures in order to instill in them divine doctrine more perfectly and more manifestly. To this end they have tapestries into which are woven the principles of the Christian religion . . . all arranged in a most ingenious manner. It is . . . an elegant and memorable invention indeed.”15 Valadés, Rhetorica Christiana, 95, quoted and translated in Watts, “Hieroglyphs of Conversion,” 423.

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Description: Allegory of the Franciscan Mission in New Spain by Valadés, Diego

Fig. 5. Diego de Valadés (Didacus Valdes), Allegory of the Franciscan Mission in New Spain. Engraved illustration in Rhetorica Christiana (Perugia, 1579), Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

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Description: Franciscan Friar Teaching Indigenous Nahuas with Images by Valadés, Diego

Fig. 6. Diego de Valadés (Didacus Valdes), Franciscan Friar Teaching Indigenous Nahuas with Images. Engraved illustration in Rhetorica Christiana (Perugia, 1579), Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

Still another illustration in Rhetorica Christiana depicts a diminutive Franciscan missionary in the foreground at left, pointing up toward the crucified Christ while preaching to a group of similarly scaled Indigenous converts at right (fig. 7). As in the other illustrations by Valadés, the friar’s pointing gesture here indicates an instructional use of imagery, in this case a depiction of the Crucifixion, which seems to unfold in the immediate presence of Indigenous acolytes. Scholars have noted the thematic and compositional resemblance between this work and a Crucifixion scene (ca. 1498) in the widely known Large Passion series of woodcuts produced by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), but Valadés has done something different in the service of his didactic colonial mission. By placing the faithful observers inside the pictorial field, with no frame separating them from the space occupied by the biblical figures, he engaged in a theatrical illusion that removed an important barrier—conceptually and spiritually—between Indigenous people and sacred Christian protagonists. The effect is roughly similar to that seen in Counter-Reformation paintings produced during the late sixteenth century in the aftermath of the Council of Trent (1545–63), when the Catholic Church decreed that holy images must instruct people and confirm articles of faith in vivid and believable ways. For example, in Vision of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1593), a Florentine altarpiece by Santi di Tito (1536–1603), intense devotion and piety seem to have brought the holy figures to life, making them burst out of their framing niche into the physical and emotional space of the viewer (fig. 8).16 For the Dürer comparison, see Bolzoni, “Mexican Nature,” 132; and Mario Sartor, Ars dicendi et excudendi: Diego Valadés incisore messicano in Italia (Padua: CLEUP, 1992), 57. On Counter-Reformation imagery in general, see Jesse M. Locker, Art and Reform in the Late Renaissance: After Trent (New York: Routledge, 2018). Regarding Santi di Tito, see Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565–1610 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 28–30; and Ralph Dekoninck, La Vision incarnante et l’image incarné: Santi di Tito et Caravage (Paris: Éditions 1, 2016).

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Description: Crucifixion with Franciscan Friar and Nahuas by Valadés, Diego

Fig. 7. Diego de Valadés (Didacus Valdes), Crucifixion with Franciscan Friar and Nahuas. Engraved illustration in Rhetorica Christiana (Perugia, 1579), Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

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Description: Vision of Saint Thomas Aquinas by Santi di Tito

Fig. 8. Santi di Tito, Vision of Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1593. Oil on panel, 142 1/8 × 91 3/4 in. (361 × 233 cm). Chiesa di San Marco, Florence

To be clear, Valadés used such visual dynamics of the burgeoning baroque period as a tool of conversion to facilitate Spanish colonialism. His efforts in this regard constituted a cultural corollary to the violence of conquest and ongoing subjugation imposed by European imperial power on the Indigenous people of New Spain. Rhetorica Christiana, with its strategic cultivation of art, memory, and language as elements of a larger civilizing mission, could be said to exemplify what the decolonial historian Walter Mignolo has famously called “the darker side of the Renaissance.”17 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).

And yet other scholars see Valadés’s achievement in Rhetorica Christiana as evidence of a productive métissage, or in-between condition, that complicates binary cultural oppositions and unidirectional notions of power. According to the historian Elena Schneider, “In the first few generations after the conquest, a learned, Latin-educated, indigenous and/or mestizo elite flourished in this in-between space, learning the cultural lexicon brought by the Spanish, but also appropriating and reusing certain elements of it in ways that reflected indigenous culture,” producing a mélange of forms.18 Elena A. Schneider, “Testerian Hieroglyphs: Language, Colonization, and Conversion in Colonial Mexico,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 69, no. 1 (2007): 12. The art historian Alessandra Russo invokes the idea of “nepantlism,” from the Nahuatl word nepantla, meaning “in between,” to refer to “unexpected possibilities of creations arising at the crossroads and . . . convergence of several traditions.” For Russo, this requires reflection “on the transformation not only of pre-Hispanic but also of European creative processes.”19 Alessandra Russo, The Untranslatable Image: A Mestizo History of the Arts in New Spain, 1500–1600 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 4.

Evidence of such reciprocal transformation can be found in Valadés’s illustration of The Great Chain of Being (see fig. 1). At first glance, the picture seems to project a thoroughly European vision of hierarchy, entirely in keeping with Counter-Reformation Tridentine standards of clarity and doctrine, with not even a whiff of the artist’s complex identity or experience. As noted earlier, the image also vividly recalls early Christian writings by Macrobius as well as Aristotle’s scale of nature. There is also the familiar trope of the lecturing Franciscans, preaching and/or and pointing upward to the sacred figures in heaven, visible in details near the center of the human realm to the left and right of the chain (fig. 9). Closer looking, however, reveals a more cosmopolitan gathering. Near the Franciscan, for example, additional people diversify the human array, including two Native Americans interacting with the friar and three other men wearing turbans. Among the birds below, at least two specimens from the Americas appear—the turkey and the quetzal—along with an ostrich, a golden eagle, and various other species. In the rank of quadrupeds, a South American llama and a dromedary, or Arabian camel, face each other on either side of the chain (fig. 10), at the center of a group that also includes a horse, a stag, a unicorn, a dragon, an elephant, and a mountain goat as well as other nondescript creatures. This mirroring inclusion of the llama, a camelid animal employed by Indigenous Andean people since the Pre-Columbian period, clearly indicates Valadés’s intercontinental, comparative awareness of analogous creatures as well as his interest in placing American species on par with their counterparts in other regions of the world. Finally, among the flora, we can make out additional American species such as maize, tropical pineapple, and desert prickly pear (fig. 11). Whereas the pineapple was native to South America, both maize and prickly pear would have been quite familiar to Valadés in Mexico, where Nahuatl-speaking people knew them as cintli and nopalli, respectively.20 Online Nahuatl Dictionary, ed. Stephanie Wood (Eugene: University of Oregon in association with Wired Humanities Projects and the National Endowment for the Humanities, 2000–2020), https://nahuatl.uoregon.edu.

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Description: The Great Chain of Being, detail by Valadés, Diego

Fig. 9. Diego de Valadés (Didacus Valdes), The Great Chain of Being (detail). Engraved illustration in Rhetorica Christiana (Perugia, 1579), Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

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Fig. 10. Diego de Valadés (Didacus Valdes), The Great Chain of Being (detail). Engraved illustration in Rhetorica Christiana (Perugia, 1579), Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

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Fig. 11. Diego de Valadés (Didacus Valdes), The Great Chain of Being (detail). Engraved illustration in Rhetorica Christiana (Perugia, 1579), Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

Depicting such natural diversity in this historical context hardly constituted a militant act of resistance or an expression of concern for environmental justice, at least not of a kind that is familiar today. Moreover, it undeniably advanced the colonial project of Spain and the Catholic Church by incorporating so-called New World phenomena into the expanding Christian European empire of influence. Created by Valadés late in life, when he was separated from his native land both geographically and culturally, his engraving conceivably memorialized that home with a sense of loss. But his enduring commitment to art as a vehicle of translation and conversion at the very least asserted the humanity of Indigenous people as having the capacity to learn and communicate in an increasingly global network of interrelationships dominated by European empire, colonization, slavery, and genocide. By the time Rhetorica Christiana appeared in print, powerful leaders in the Spanish Catholic hierarchy were questioning early colonial Franciscan humanist experiments in transcultural understanding such as those that had permitted Valadés to receive an education. In 1555, amid growing Counter-Reformation anxiety, a Catholic synod organized by Bishop and Inquisitor Alonso de Montúfar prohibited the ordination of Black people, mestizos, and Indigenous people while ordering an investigation of missionary manuals used to instruct Native Americans in Christianity. Unlike such reactionary activity, Rhetorica Christiana expressed a firm Franciscan belief in the capacity of Indigenous people and their legitimate participation in the global Catholic mission. Refusing to forget the importance of Native knowledge and culture, even as he folded these into a global Christian imperium, Valadés helped visualize a diverse world.21 Watts, “Hieroglyphs of Conversion,” 406, 432–33. See also Magnus Lundberg, Unification and Conflict: The Church Politics of Alonso de Montúfar OP, Archbishop of Mexico, 1554–1572 (Uppsala: Swedish Institute of Mission Research, 2002).

POSTSCRIPT: CURATING COMPLEXITY

In 2018–19, Valadés’s engraving of The Great Chain of Being was included in the traveling art exhibition Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment. Ironically, at one exhibition venue a decision was made to delete information concerning the artist’s mestizo identity from the associated gallery label; the label also omitted mention of Valadés’s depiction of Indigenous people and American species of flora and fauna.22 Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment was conceived at the Princeton University Art Museum by Karl Kusserow and Alan C. Braddock. The venue in question was the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, where the exhibition appeared February 2–May 5, 2019. As a result, the picture undoubtedly appeared to most exhibition visitors as an entirely undifferentiated, top-down European visualization of nature and the cosmos. Evidently, its subtle inflections complicated the moral clarity of the institution’s desired message, which essentially presented Indigenous people and Europeans as inhabiting separate, unbridgeable cultural traditions in a perpetual state of conflict. Such choices oddly recall Montúfar’s sixteenth-century inquisitionary impulse to regulate knowledge and identity, but they also speak volumes about the plight of complexity and nuance today amid debates about mestizaje and other boundary-blurring categories. The debates in question have become quite heated. Whereas some twentieth-century scholars such as José Vasconcelos and Gloria Anzaldúa celebrated mestizaje as a liberatory category denoting cultural and biological mixing that resists the racist boundaries of imperialism, more recent critics—notably Norma Alarcón and Chon A. Noriega—have asserted its problematic potential to erase fine distinctions in favor of a generalized sense of fusion, which they say downplays both historical and contemporary inequities and violence.23 José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race/La raza cosmica, trans. Didier T. Jaén (1948; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987); Norma Alarcón, “The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism,” in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1997), 288–99; Chon A. Noriega, “Between a Weapon and a Formula: Chicano Cinema and Its Contexts,” in Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance, ed. Chon A. Noriega (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 141–67. See also Rafael Pérez-Torres, Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicago Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). For a useful summary of evolving critical discussion about mestizaje, see Benjamin Valentin, “Mestizaje,” in Hispanic American Religious Cultures, ed. Miguel A. De La Torre, 2 vols. (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC Clio, 2009), 1:351–57.

In Exhibiting Mestizaje (2001), comparing dominant and subversive U.S. museum practices of representing Mexican American cultural history, Karen Mary Davalos observes that “overlapping histories of mestizaje . . . help to produce complex representational practices by people of Mexican descent. A long history of intercultural mixing makes it nearly impossible (or at least improbable) to contain Mexican-origin representational practices within binary models of ‘us’ or ‘them.’ Polarities cannot address the multiple perspectives that come from a history of mestizaje.”24 Karen Mary Davalos, Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), 7.

In the case of the rewritten label about Valadés and his work, by collapsing the artist and the nuances of his engraving into a homogeneous “European” tradition (which was never homogeneous in the first place), the exhibition label did not offer a critical perspective on mestizaje akin to those articulated by Alarcón and other recent scholars. Instead, the erasure of difference and historical density resulted in a binary model in the mode of “us” and “them.” Ultimately, the history of art and ecology tells a subtler, more complicated story of biodiversity that is worth remembering.

Epigraph: “memory, n.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/116363.

1 The bibliography on Valadés is large and growing. An especially good critical biography appears in Pauline Moffitt Watts, “Hieroglyphs of Conversion: Alien Discourses in Diego Valadés’s Rhetorica Christiana,” in Gli ordini religiosi mendicanti, tradizione e dissenso (Pistoia, Italy: Centro riviste della Provincia romana, 1992), 405–33. See also Gerardo Ramírez Vidal, El arte de la memoria en la “Rhetorica Christiana” de fray Diego Valadés (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2016); Carmen José Alejos-Grau, Diego Valadés, educador de la Nueva España: Ideas pedagógicas de la “Rhetorica Christiana” (1579) (Pamplona, Spain: Ediciones Eunate, 1996); Don Paul Abbott, “Diego Valadés: An Ancient Rhetoric in a New World,” in Rhetoric in the New World: Rhetorical Theory and Practice in Colonial Spanish America (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 41–59; Esteban J. Palomera, Fray Diego Valadés, o.f.m.: Evangelizador humanista de la Nueva España; el hombre, su época y su obra (Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana, Departamento de Historia, 1988); and Francisco de la Maza, Fray Diego Valadés: Escritor y grabador franciscano del siglo XVI (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 1945). For recent sources specifically discussing his engraving of the Great Chain of Being, see Laura Elaine Leaper, “Time, Memory, and Ritual: Deciphering Visual Rhetoric in Diego Valadés’s Rhetorica Christiana” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2012), 38, 144–45; and Lina Bolzoni, “Mexican Nature in Diego Valadés’ Rhetorica Christiana (1579),” Studies in the History of Art 69 (2008): 127–41. On the Great Chain of Being as a concept, see Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936); and Mark L. Brake, “The Great Chain of Being,” in Revolution in Science: How Galileo and Darwin Changed Our World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 89–102. »

2 My translation. »

3 Aristotle, History of Animals, trans. A. W. Thompson, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 922. »

4 Macrobius, quoted in Lovejoy, Great Chain of Being, 63. In referring to “Homer’s golden chain,” Macrobius Christianized a passage in The Iliad (book 8, paragraph 1), in which Zeus asserts his authority among the Olympian gods by saying, “Make fast from heaven a chain of gold, and lay hold of it, all you gods and all you goddesses; yet you could not drag to earth out of heaven Zeus the counselor most high, not even though you labored mightily. But whenever I was really minded to pull with all my heart, then with earth itself I would draw it up and with the sea as well; and the rope I would then bind around a peak of Olympus and all those things would hang in space. By so much do I surpass gods and surpass men.” Homer, Iliad, vol. 1, trans. A. T. Murray, rev. William F. Wyatt, Loeb Classical Library 170 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1924), 351–53. »

5 Didacus Valdes (Diego de Valadés), Rhetorica Christiana: Ad concionandi, et orandi vsum accommodata, vtriusq[ue] facultatis exemplis suo loco insertis; quae quidem, ex Indorum maximè deprompta sunt historiis; unde praeter doctrinam, sum[m]a quoque delectatio comparabitur (Perugia: Apud Petrumiacobum Petrutium, 1579). My translation of the subtitle. »

6 On the missionary experience of Valadés, see Watts, “Hieroglyphs of Conversion,” 407–11. »

7 Sir Walter Raleigh, The History of the World in Five Books (London: Printed for Walter Burke, 1614), [xviii–xix]. »

8 On extinction and the collapse of the Great Chain of Being, see Mark V. Barrow Jr., Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 15–46. »

9 Agustín de Vetancurt, Chronica de la Provincia del Santo Evangelio de México: Quarta parte del Teatro Mexicano de los successos religiosos (Mexico City, 1697), quoted in Palomera, Fray Diego Valadés, 82. For other affirmations of the mestizo status of Valadés, see Bolzoni, “Mexican Nature,” 132; Abbott, “Diego Valadés,” 42; and Kathleen Ann Meyers, “Aztec Dance along the Ruta de Cortés: A Search for New Identities,” Hispanófila, no. 171 (June 2017): 172. Jaime Lara expresses uncertainty about the identity of Valadés in Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 63. In her dissertation, Laura Elaine Leaper attempts to challenge the artist’s mestizidad by citing the lack of a clear published statement by him. Her arguments are unconvincing, however, because they fail to consider the subtle realities of mixed ancestry in the context of European racism and institutional prohibitions imposed by Montúfar in 1555 against Indigenous education (see p. X), which undoubtedly forced those mestizos who were already educated and ordained to be very discreet about their identity. See Leaper, “Time, Memory and Ritual,” 62. More convincing is Watts, who suggests (following Palomera) that Valadés was “surreptitiously ordained” in the Franciscan order and therefore could only broach his identity in an “oblique and masked” manner. Watts, “Hieroglyphs of Conversion,” 409, 410. »

10 For discussion of Valadés’s illustration of the Mexica calendar in Rhetorica Christiana, see Bolzoni, “Mexican Nature,” 132, 134; and Watts, “Hieroglyphs of Conversion,” 421. »

11 Watts, “Hieroglyphs of Conversion,” 421. On the art of memory, see the classic study by Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (1966; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); the reference to “mnemotechnics” appears on page 4. »

12 Valadés, Rhetorica Christiana, 90, 93, quoted and translated in Watts, “Hieroglyphs of Conversion,” 418, 419. »

13 Watts, “Hieroglyphs of Conversion,” 418–22. Valadés cites Horapollo explicitly in Rhetorica Christiana, 93, saying, “They [Indigenous Mexicans] have this in common with the Egyptians who also fashioned meaning in the same way through figures, designating speed by a hawk, vigilance through a crocodile, authority by a lion. Concerning such designations see Horapollo’s De literis hieroglyphicis.” On Horapollo and the Renaissance rediscovery of Egyptian hieroglyphs, see Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). »

14 Byron Ellsworth Hamann, “Object, Image, Cleverness: The Lienzo de Tlaxcala,” Art History 36, no. 3 (2013): 518. For a discussion of Valadés and his general familiarity with the lienzo form, see Louise M. Burkhart, Elizabeth Hill Boone, and David Tavárez, “The Atzaqualco Catechism and Colonial Mexican Catechismal Pictography,” in Painted Words: Nahua Catholicism, Politics, and Memory in the Atzaqualco Pictorial Catechism, Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology Studies Series 39 (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2017), 14, 16–17. On the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, see Burkhart, Boone, and Tavárez, “Atzaqualco Catechism,” 101, 104, 130, 135; Guadalupe Alemán Ramírez, ed., Lienzo de Tlaxcala: Códice histórico del siglo XVI (Tlaxcala, Mexico: Gobierno del Estado, 2016); and Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Victors and Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico (Boston: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 123–26. »

15 Valadés, Rhetorica Christiana, 95, quoted and translated in Watts, “Hieroglyphs of Conversion,” 423. »

16 For the Dürer comparison, see Bolzoni, “Mexican Nature,” 132; and Mario Sartor, Ars dicendi et excudendi: Diego Valadés incisore messicano in Italia (Padua: CLEUP, 1992), 57. On Counter-Reformation imagery in general, see Jesse M. Locker, Art and Reform in the Late Renaissance: After Trent (New York: Routledge, 2018). Regarding Santi di Tito, see Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565–1610 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 28–30; and Ralph Dekoninck, La Vision incarnante et l’image incarné: Santi di Tito et Caravage (Paris: Éditions 1, 2016). »

17 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). »

18 Elena A. Schneider, “Testerian Hieroglyphs: Language, Colonization, and Conversion in Colonial Mexico,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 69, no. 1 (2007): 12. »

19 Alessandra Russo, The Untranslatable Image: A Mestizo History of the Arts in New Spain, 1500–1600 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 4. »

20 Online Nahuatl Dictionary, ed. Stephanie Wood (Eugene: University of Oregon in association with Wired Humanities Projects and the National Endowment for the Humanities, 2000–2020), https://nahuatl.uoregon.edu. »

21 Watts, “Hieroglyphs of Conversion,” 406, 432–33. See also Magnus Lundberg, Unification and Conflict: The Church Politics of Alonso de Montúfar OP, Archbishop of Mexico, 1554–1572 (Uppsala: Swedish Institute of Mission Research, 2002). »

22 Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment was conceived at the Princeton University Art Museum by Karl Kusserow and Alan C. Braddock. The venue in question was the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, where the exhibition appeared February 2–May 5, 2019. »

23 José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race/La raza cosmica, trans. Didier T. Jaén (1948; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987); Norma Alarcón, “The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism,” in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1997), 288–99; Chon A. Noriega, “Between a Weapon and a Formula: Chicano Cinema and Its Contexts,” in Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance, ed. Chon A. Noriega (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 141–67. See also Rafael Pérez-Torres, Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicago Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). For a useful summary of evolving critical discussion about mestizaje, see Benjamin Valentin, “Mestizaje,” in Hispanic American Religious Cultures, ed. Miguel A. De La Torre, 2 vols. (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC Clio, 2009), 1:351–57. »

24 Karen Mary Davalos, Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), 7. »

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