Work in Progress Talk by Allison Caplan, Assistant Professor, History of Art

Prof. Allison Caplan will present a Work in Progress talk titled, “Flickering Creations: A Nahua Theory of Precious Art in Ancient Mexico.”

Abstract:
Among the Nahua people of the Aztec Empire, precious things—known as tlazohtli in the Nahuatl language—denoted a diverse and open-ended group of valued materials, including precious stones, feathers, metals, shells, and flowers, as well as rulers, children, and sacred phenomena. Tlazohtli were the things of the world that inspired emotions of love and marveling, invited delicate forms of treatment, and gave rise to the strong interpersonal relationships that knit the world together. Though the various media that comprised precious art, including lapidary, feather, metal, and flower arts, have typically been treated in scholarship as discrete, for Nahuas, such precious media formed a unified genre. In this presentation, I examine Nahua constructions of precious art and explore how centering Indigenous art theory shifts understanding of major artworks in precious stones, feathers, and metals by bringing to the fore these items’ ability to shape the behavior of others towards them and to form their own potent social relationships.