Due antichi monumenti di architettura messicana (Rome, 1804): an expelled Mexican Jesuit puts El Tajin and Xochicalco before the architects of Europe
In 1804 a Jesuit expelled from New Spain published in Rome, in Italian and with plates, the first European book devoted to two Mesoamerican buildings. Pedro Jose Marquez worked at one remove, from two Mexico City printed reports of 1785 and 1791, converting American varas into Roman palms so that architects could compare. He argued from the fabric that the builders had science, and printed, as a Jesuit, that the burning of the indigenous books had destroyed the evidence.
Why this wins its question: The English-language account of Mesoamerican archaeology almost always begins in the 1840s with Stephens and Catherwood, and the eighteenth-century Mexican work that preceded them is met, if at all, as a footnote about Alzate. The book that carried that work to Europe has been in print since 1804 and is almost never quoted. Written from Marquez's own pages, this object gives the mechanism instead of the impression: a Jesuit expelled from New Spain in 1767, a member of the academies of Madrid, Florence and Bologna, publishing in Rome with an imprimatur signed by a Roman architect, converting varas into Castilian feet and then into the Roman architectural palm so that his colleagues could measure El Tajin against what they already knew; the Totonac name of the site and its meaning; the Nahuatl name of a stone seat tied to the straw equipal still in use; galleries given in palms, a cinnabar floor, lime mortar and masonry vaults; and the argument put as a question the fabric answers rather than as an assertion about race. It then declines every move that would make the case easier. It says on its second page that the author never saw the monuments and is extracting two Mexican newspapers. It refuses to interpret the glyphs it reproduces. It records that sugar-mill builders were quarrying the site. And a Jesuit writing in Rome puts on the page that his own church's burning of the indigenous books was a ruinous slaughter, that the peoples of Mexico hid their books out of a scholar's esteem for them, and that what little survives is owed to indigenous converts who learned to write in Latin letters.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The book exists, it is dated, and its dedication is the first thing it says. The engraved title page reads "Due Antichi Monumenti di Architettura Messicana illustrati da D. Pietro Marquez, Socio delle Accad. di Belle Arti di Madrid, di Firenze, e di Bologna, dedicati Alla Molto Nobile, Illustre ed Imperiale Citta di Messico", with an engraved eagle standing on a nopal, and beneath it "ROMA, Presso il Salomoni, 1804, Con Permesso". A man writing in Rome, holding membership of three European academies of fine arts, dedicates a book about two ruined American buildings to the city he had been expelled from, and puts the Mexican device on its title page. The last leaf carries the Roman imprimatur, dated 12 January 1804 and approved for the press by Girolamo Masi, described as architetto, who reports that he has found the work fit to please "gli Eruditi, e ai Professori delle belle Arti, a vantaggio de' quali e diretto".
The evidence is at one remove and the book says so on its second page. Marquez states that he will give "le notizie di alcune opere architettoniche di quelle genti" from two monuments "non ha molto pubblicati nella Citta di Messico colle respettive descrizioni": the first "l'anno 1785. nella Gazzetta ordinaria sotto li 12. Luglio", the second "in un supplemento alla Gazzetta di letteratura della stessa Citta sul fine dell' anno 1791. con questo titolo: Descrizione delle Antichita di Xochicalco scritta per D. Gius. Ant. Alzate Socio della R. Accad. delle Scienze di Parigi". He will make an extract of those papers "per adattare le notizie al genio della dotta Nazione Italiana", adding reflections of his own. He also refers his reader to "la dotta dissertazione del Sig. Gama sopra di una pietra pochi anni fa dissotterrata nel Messico", which he says will shortly appear in translation. Every field measurement in the book is therefore Alzate's or the anonymous relator's, not his.
The first monument is El Tajin, and it is located, named in its own language and placed on the map. "Nel mezzo di un folto bosco, in un sito chiamato in lingua Totonaca Tajin, che vuol dire fulmine, o tuono, a due leghe, o sei miglia verso il Ponente della popolazione indiana nominata Papantla si scorge codesto monumento." Papantla is a Spanish alcaldia mayor with ten subject settlements and about four thousand souls, and the site is placed at 275 degrees 10 minutes of longitude and 20 degrees 35 minutes of latitude. The building is described as pyramidal in the whole and stepped in detail, of six entire bodies with the topmost much destroyed, its plan square and its superimposed bodies square, and the figure of plate I is said to have been corrected against the text of the relation.
The measurements are converted so that an architect in Rome can use them, which is the book's quiet technical contribution. The first of the six bodies is given as thirty varas on each side, and the reader is then told the conversion: "Ogni vara costa di tre piedi castigliani, ed ogni piede corrisponde ad oncie 15. di palmo architettonico romano." American field measures are carried into Castilian feet and then into the Roman architectural palm, the working unit of the profession the book addresses. The same page reaches for comparison rather than for wonder, setting the stepped pyramid beside "i piu antichi Monumenti del Mondo, ch'esistono nell' Egitto" and beside the mound of Cholula, and citing Clavigero's Storia antica del Messico for the many temples of the nation that differ in their stairs and agree in their pyramidal form.
The cost is on the record in the author's own voice, and the author is a Jesuit writing about his own church. Discussing why the Papantla monument was unknown to the Mexica and to the first Spaniards, he judges the most likely explanation to be deliberate concealment, "sapendosi, che quelle genti al vedersi strappare dalle mani i loro libri, per essere dati al fuoco col pretesto, o persuazione, che non contenessero senonse cose diaboliche, procurarono, come fu loro possibile di nascondere quei che poterono, ed occultare, se avessero potuto le loro piu pregevoli antichita per salvarle dalla rovinosa strage." They buried books, statues and vessels, he adds, "e cio non tanto per motivo di religione, quanto per la stima, che meritamente avevano dei libri, ed altri monumenti, dove si contenevano le loro istorie, e le loro scienze". The burning is called a ruinous slaughter and the motive assigned to the hiders is scholarly esteem.
The second monument is Xochicalco, and the book is candid that what the plate shows is a reconstruction. Marquez reports that the relator found the first body standing, saw stones of the second placed on it, in particular the corner stone of plate 4 figure 4, and was assured by witnesses who said they had seen them that five bodies had once existed; on that footing he drew the building of five bodies, carried the cornice he had seen on the first through all of them, and reproduced the half-relief figures of one of the four faces. The whole was drawn pyramidal both because the Mexicans raised their public buildings in that form and because the surviving body and the corner stone are worked with a batter. A stone seat said to have stood on the last body is given its Nahuatl name and a living gloss: "Ximotlalli e parola messicana, che significa sedia", of the kind now made of straw and called equipalli or xiquiuhpalli.
The underground works at Xochicalco are described as engineering, with dimensions in Roman palms. From an opening under the first terrace a passage runs one hundred and twelve palms north to south to a ruined cataratta; from another point a gallery of two hundred and twenty-five palms divides at its end and leads to a hall forty-eight palms wide. The whole is nearly horizontal, its floor set with lime mortar and painted with cinnabar, its walls lined with stone and lime, its ceiling reinforced where necessary "con volte di muratura". The hall is held up by two piers and has a well-preserved conical cataratta in its last angle which the relator conjectures rose to the top of the building above. The same passage records the damage: parts of the system are choked with fallen wall and vault, and the work may have been spoiled afterwards "per cercare dei tesori", the opinion of treasure buried under old buildings being reported as it is reported of the pyramids of Egypt.
The argument the book was written to make is stated as a question the fabric answers. "Se dunque gli antichi abitatori di quelle terre seppero fare la descritta opera, come piu disputare sulla loro abilita? Come mettere in dubbio le cognizioni, che in essi si suppongono per sapere rompere con regolato ordine le viscere di un sassoso monte; per seguitare le linee dritte si orizzontali, che verticali, non ostante la durezza sorprendente della materia; per consolidare con murature diverse l'opera, secondoche il richiedeva la debolezza di qualche sito; per preparare la calcina a costruire muri". The two piers of the hall are read as columns left standing in the living rock as the chamber was cut, and the vaults as evidence that the builders knew the species even where none survives on the scale of European ones, the small barrel vaults over the sweat baths "chiamate nella loro lingua temazcalli" being cited as the surviving instance, which the author elsewhere compares with the laconica of ancient Greece and Rome.
Two further passages keep the book from reading as a celebration. The stone of the site was being carried away in the author's own century: hard, lime-resistant stones of the kind used for mills are scarce for many leagues around, "ragion per la quale i vicini fabbricatori di zucchero le andavano a pigliare pe' loro usi", saving themselves the longer journeys that the builders of the monument had not been deterred by. And the loss of the written record is put as a counterfactual with the burning named as its cause: "Se si fossero sagacemente separate le idee superstiziose dalle storiche, e scientifiche, invece di fare di tutte quante un fascio col fine (per altro buono) di far ardere nelle fiamme l'idolatria, quanto non si saprebbe delle loro antichita, e delle loro cognizioni?" The little that is known, he writes, is owed to some of the first indigenous converts "che impararono a scrivere coi nostri caratteri" and wrote the explanations down in them, and much even of that has been hidden or lost.
The book names the scholarship it stands on and then refuses to overreach it, which is why its restraint is worth recording. Marquez lists Boturini, "che indago dagli stessi Indiani molte notizie"; Clavigero in the Storia antica di Messico; Fabrega, who collected from his youth and continued to collect in Rome toward an instructive dictionary and wrote the dissertation on the Mexican codex owned by Cardinal Borgia, which he hopes will be published; and "il dotto D. Antonio Gama, che stampo in Messico le lucidazioni di varie antichita indiane". Having named them he declines the obvious move: "Noi non siamo provveduti di tanto capitale per intraprendere l'interpretazione nemmeno di quei pochi, che si dinotano nella Tav. 4", undertaking only to give the notices of the two monuments and to add about the glyphs no more than the relation itself contains. A book arguing for American learning stops short of reading the glyphs it reproduces.
The volume also refuses the comfortable version of the conquest, in the first paragraphs and again in its appendix. The Mexica are introduced as the most powerful of the nations of Anahuac and therefore the ones "con essa ebbero ad intraprendere le sanguinose ben note battaglie"; and the sentence that follows assigns the outcome where the sources put it, the Tlaxcalans with other rival peoples, "i quali, riuniti in numero di circa 200. mila soldati sotto le bandiere Spagnuole, distrussero il Messicano impero". The appendix prints an extract of Cortes's letter in Italian, in which the conqueror describes the market of Tlaxcala, counts four hundred towers of what he calls mosques from a tower of Cholula, and writes of Iztapalapa that its lord has palaces as great and as well built "come si possino trovare in tutta la Spagna". The evidence for American building is made to include the testimony of the man who destroyed the city.
What this object does not establish should be stated as plainly as what it does. Nothing here confirms that the two monuments are as the book describes them: Marquez never saw either, and the plates and figures were not read against any modern survey of El Tajin or Xochicalco. The 1785 Gazeta report and Alzate's 1791 supplement, on which the whole book rests, were not opened, so the extract cannot be collated with its originals, and the accuracy of Alzate's reconstruction of five bodies from testimony and scattered stones is not assessed here. Nor does the corpus assert that this was the first printed study of any American monument: it is the first book of its kind found reachable here, published in Europe in a European language for European architects, and the Mexican reports it extracts came first. The plates themselves, the dedication text, and the pages of the Cortes extract other than those listed in the source entry were not read.