Assembling Bodies: Multimediality in Nahua Precious Costumery

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Polychromy, Multimediality, and Visual Complexity in Mesoamerican Art" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The working of precious materials—greenstones, shells, turquoise, gold, and feathers—represented an arena of artistic specialization and tailored, technological expertise among the Late Postclassic Nahuas. Such specialized productions were almost exclusively destined to serve as components of multimedia costumes, which adorned and made tangible the bodies of rulers, nobles, god-impersonators, and gods. This presentation will examine the practices of assemblage implicit in multimedia costumes, asking how the layering and juxtaposition of different precious devices and materials can be understood as itself a Nahua artistic practice, guided by key aesthetic tenets related to movement, brilliance, and sound. This analysis brings to the fore Nahua approaches to assemblage as an artistic strategy and asks how such display-oriented practices intersect with and generate new understandings of the materials and skills entailed in earlier stages of production.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Polychromy, Multimediality, and Visual Complexity in Mesoamerican Art

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32478