30 May 2025 / 10 House
Article suitable for older students
Find out moreWhy are there no backgrounds in codex images?
ORIGINAL QUESTION received from - and thanks to - Joe: From looking at the pictures your website provides, and other resources I’ve noticed the photos don’t have any background. In ancient chinese, or Indian painting and such have backgrounds like trees, weather, buildings etc. I understand the Aztecs used a lot of symbolism in their art, so I was wondering if that or any other reason for no backgrounds. (Answered by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)
You’ve essentially answered your own question. Elizabeth Hill Boone explains: ‘The images are conventionalised and suppress any potentially confusing details... Paintings of places are not naturalistic landscapes in any European sense, for they make use of standard pictorial conventions’.
’Locations were almost always identified by place signs’, though sometimes a pictorial description was used, to show a general landscape such as arid desert (see our entry on ‘Mexica Maps’, in this section). Places were commonly depicted with a ‘foundation element’ on which linguistic ‘qualifiers’ were added to identify particular locations. The image here shows some of the most frequently used topographic elements: by far the most common being ‘hill’, followed by platforms, fields and plains, bodies of water (lakes or springs), marketplaces, ballcourts and so on...
Source:-
• Hill Boone, Elizabeth (2000) Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs, University of Texas Press, Austin.
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