Missionary Gift Records of Mexican Objects in Early Modern Italy

This essay discusses two sixteenth-century printed Italian sources – the anonymous and undated Descrittione dell’India Occidentale and Leandro Alberti’s Historie di Bologna (1548) – that record missionary gifts of Mesoamerican objects brought to Italy in early modern times, exploring the motivations and ideological agendas that prompted them. Their analysis, dwelling on the category of ingenium used both in the discussed Italian sources and in contemporary Dominican texts, shows that material properties of the gifted objects were metonymically transformed in intellectual qualities of their producers, in order to build a religious discourse on the rationality of American Indians. Ironically, Dominican missionaries perceived the idolatrous objects they destroyed or took away from Indians as proofs of their potential conversion to Christianity. As proxies of their creators, artefacts functioned as physical and tangible materializations of an evangelization project, of a mainly Dominican discourse on the transformative role that the Gospel could have on faraway peoples whose humanity was made tangible by their technologically surprising material productions.