Abstract

Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, which contains an account of the origins of painting, offered sixteenth-century European artists a gift as they struggled to advance the status of painting as an intellectual rather than a mechanical art. The Roman authority was also read by Indigenous intellectuals in New Spain; they described their autochthonous painting practice in an account written in the Nahuatl language to respond to Pliny. This article offers a new translation of their account and a careful analysis that draws on recent work by material scientists to construct an Indigenous ontology of the image, and gives a comparison to the Plinian ideal. Crucial to both accounts is the role of the shadow as it relates to the nature of representation.

摘要

老普林尼的《自然史》包含了对绘画起源的描述，为十六世纪的欧洲艺术家提供了一份礼物，因为他们努力提高绘画作为一种知识性艺术而不是机械艺术的地位。新西班牙的土著知识分子也阅读了罗马权威。他们在一篇用纳瓦特尔语写成的记录中描述了他们的本土绘画实践，以回应普林尼。本文对他们的叙述进行了新的翻译，并利用材料科学家最近的工作进行了仔细的分析，构建了图像的本土本体论，并与普林尼理想进行了比较。对于这两个帐户来说至关重要的是影子的作用，因为它与代表性的本质有关。