The 1576 epidemic’s death toll accelerated exponentially. The destruction was immense, with many thousands dying of sickness and others of hunger due to the collapse of agricultural production and supply chains.
To avoid contagion, the Florentine Codex’s authors isolated themselves in the College of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, where they continued working on their manuscript. Despite their seclusion, the epidemic eventually reached the artists, and the college was abandoned: “there was no one in it, everyone left dead or sickened.” The austere and incomplete twelfth and final volume attests to the tragedy. Its initial pages lack color; its final pages lack images. Disease took the lives of many of the artists, leaving the visual history incomplete, the blank spaces a material manifestation of the knowledge forever lost to colonial devastation.
Image Source
- Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Mediceo Palatino 220 (Florentine Codex), 1577, book 12, fols. 73v–74r (3:480v–481r). Courtesy of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.
Further Reading
- Cook, Noble David. Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650. New Approaches to the Americas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
- Magaloni Kerpel, Diana. The Colors of the New World: Artists, Materials, and the Creation of the Florentine Codex. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2014.
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