From the sketchbook

Page of illustration from the Florentine Codex

The idea for the Benedictine project was pretty straightforward: fidelity to the original. The question was how to present it. I offered to variants.

The client liked the second one which was also my favorite. We liked the floral frame and the idea of illustrating the Apparition in the four corner panels. The Aztecs, or Nahua as they called themselves, had a very sophisticated way of doing agriculture. As they lived in the middle of a lake (yes, where parts of Mexico City are today used to be the capital of the Aztec Empire called Tenochtitlan, a small island in the middle of Lake Texcoco) , the Nahua people became adept at a agricultural technique called chinampas, or floating gardens, on the shallow lake beds of the Valley of Mexico, particularly in the region of Xochimilco where they still grow them to this day. Here they cultivated corn, beans, squash and chili peppers, tomatoes, amaranth, and ...flowers. Their botanical gardens were some of the earliest in the world and impressed the Spanish who maintained them after the conquest and utilized the medicinal plants in their hospitals. Flowers, like quetzal feathers, jade and turquoise were precious to the Aztecs and had profound symbolic meanings, among others, for art, song and poetry. On many levels, it seemed appropriate that flowers should be part of the border as they also played a central and symbolic role in the story of the Apparition.

To develop the design of the border I went to the Florentine Codex (which I mention in my previous post). Inspired by the beautiful renderings of the Nahua artisans, I sketched many different flowers and combined them in a decorative border for the mosaic. I also paid attention to the way the human figures with their particular physiognomy were represented in preparation for the narrative panels.