Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Engagement with Mesoamerican Material Culture

The essay reconstructs Ulisse Aldrovandi's engagement with Mesoamerican material culture, examining the European circulation spheres through which pre-Hispanic and colonial artifacts entered his collection. Through a systematic review of manuscripts (particularly the Observationes), woodcuts, and printed texts from the Musaeum metallicum, the author identifies two principal channels of transmission: on the one hand, Dominican gifts, with particular reference to Domingo de Betanzos' 1533 donation; on the other, a Spanish-Italian clerical network active in the circulation of colonial artifacts, such as feather mosaics. The contribution proposes new iconographic identifications and cultural attributions for individual objects—obsidian knives, greenstone sculptures, the Yacatecuhtli mosaic mask—integrating historical sources with the results of non-invasive scientific analyses. Particular attention is given to the Roman collection of Tommaso de' Cavalieri, whose documentation preserves a previously unrecorded reference to a pre-Hispanic conflict between the Mixtec kingdoms of Tututepec and Tlaxiaco. The study thus demonstrates the heuristic value of the Aldrovandi archive as a primary source for contemporary Mesoamerican studies.