Estudios de la materialidad de los códices mesoamericanos: II. Acercamientos desde la historia y perspectivas para el futuro

This chapter and the previous one sketch a history of the scholarly work that has focused on the materiality of the Mesoamerican pictorial manuscripts, in order to identify the materials constituting their physical support, background preparation, and pigments. Due to the traditional split between scientific and historical studies in this field, this chapter focuses on the latter, while the former are discussed in the preceding chapter, which forms the first part of a wider piece (Domenici and Dupey in this volume). Specifically, the present chapter reviews the development of the understanding and interpretation of the historical sources that deal with the origins, composition, preparation, and uses of the pigments applied on Mesoamerican codices, in particular through the analysis of two fundamental 16th-century accounts: The Florentine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagún and the treatise on natural history by Francisco Hernández. The final section of the chapter includes reflections on the state of the art in this specific domain of research –both in the scientific and historical fields– and outlines perspectives for future inquiries.