This page of the Cruz-Badiano Codex provides a recipe for treating siriasis, a children’s disease characterized by inflammation of the brain and burning fever. Like most sources that document Mesoamerican plants, this page was produced by Indigenous artists and healers fluent in Nahua traditions and trained in European thought at schools like the College of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco. In the depiction of the acamallotetl plant (left), we find a masterful combination of Mesoamerican and European art techniques and pigments typical of sources from this period.
The Mesoamerican tradition used flat and saturated colors with defined contour lines and abundant pictographic symbolism, in contrast to the European tradition, which used modeling and shading achieved by the gradation of colors and the layering of pigments. At the bottom of acamallotetl, there is a Mesoamerican pictograph symbolizing flowing water, painted and clearly delineated with saturated blue. There are many other Mesoamerican symbols, such as the diverging waterways ending with red jewels and shells—Mesoamerican symbols for preciousness—and the geometrical forms around the roots that likely indicate a kind of stone. The trunk of the plant is painted with pink and dark green shading, which gradually transitions to the greens of the leaves and flowers, displaying European techniques for providing a sense of volume that contrasts with the saturated Mesoamerican water pictograph.
Image Source
- Martín de la Cruz. Libellus de medicinalibus indorum herbis [Cruz-Badiano Codex]. Translated by Juan Badiano. 1552. Fol. 61r. Courtesy of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, México (CC-BY-NC-ND).
Further Reading
- Zetina, Sandra, Tatiana Falcón, Elsa Arroyo, and José Luis Ruvalcaba. “The Encoded Language of Herbs: Material Insights into the De la Cruz-Badiano Codex.” In Colors between Two Worlds: The Florentine Codex of Bernardino De Sahagún, edited by Louis A. Waldman, 220–55. Villa I Tatti 28. Florence: Villa I Tatti and Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, 2012.
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