16^th Annual Breslauer Lecture

This talk discusses the circulation and reception of Indigenous manuscripts in Mexico and Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Indigenous authors in pre-contact and early colonial Mexico created pictorial manuscripts that record Native knowledge in image and word. Collectively, these documents constitute an incomparable Indigenous archive. They entered private and institutional collections on both sides of the Atlantic, provoking a great deal of interest. However, their reception in early modern Europe almost without exception reached interpretive dead ends. Poised at the intersection of Indigenous studies, the history of books and libraries, and the history of knowledge production, this talk discusses the trajectories of several Mexican manuscripts to address questions of materiality, mobility, and the possibilities and limits of translation and interpretation. It follows Indigenous manuscripts in movement and stasis, as knowledge inscriptions and as potential sources for knowledge production, to consider the flow and friction of Mesoamerican Indigenous objects and practices in the early modern world.

Daniela Bleichmar is Professor of Art History and History at the University of Southern California, where she also serves as the founding director of the Levan Institute for the Humanities (2019–) and Director of the USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities (2020–3). She previously served as Associate Provost for Faculty and Student Initiatives in the Arts and Humanities (2015–2020).

Born in Argentina and raised in Buenos Aires and Mexico City, she received a B.A. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. Her research and teaching address the history of images, objects, and texts in colonial Latin America and early modern Europe, focusing particularly on the histories of visual and material culture; science and knowledge production; circulation, encounters, and exchanges; collections; and books. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Getty Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, and the ACLS, among others. 

Her publications include the monographs Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2012) and Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin (Yale University Press, 2017), which accompanied the exhibition by the same name that she curated at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in Fall 2017. Other publications include four co-edited volumes: Visual History: The Past in Pictures (2019), Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World (2015), Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World (2011),and Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800 (2009). She is currently completing a book titled Translating the Aztecs: A Visual History of the Codex Mendoza, which is the first biography of one of the most celebrated Indigenous manuscripts from colonial Mexico, tracing its extraordinary life from Mexico City in the 1540s to London in the 1830s.