Book Description

This title offers analysis of Mexican painted history as an intellectual, documentary and pictorial genre. The author explores how Mexican historians conceptualized and painted their past, and introduces the major pictorial records: Aztec annals and cartographic histories and Mixtec screenfolds and lienzos. Boone focuses her analysis on the kinds of stories told in the histories and on how the manuscripts work pictorially to encode, organize, and preserve these narratives. This twofold investigation aims to broaden our understanding of how preconquest Mexicans use pictographic history for political and social ends. It also demonstrates how graphic writing systems created a broadly understood visual language that communicated effectively across ethnic and linguistic boundaries