In collaboration with indigenous informants, scribes and artists, Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun compiled "Primeros Memoriales" in Mexico, from 1558 to 1560, as a tool to help missionaries recognise and extirpate native religious practices. Written almost entirely in Nahuatl and illustrated with colour drawings, the "Primeros Memoriales", ironically, serves today as a major source of information on preconquest Aztec culture. In this art-historical study, Ellen T. Baird analyses the structure and style of the "Primeros Memoriales" drawings in order to place the work in its 16th-century colonial Mexican context. Though no Aztec pictorial manuscripts have survived to the present day, Baird demonstrates that many illustrations in the "Primeros Memoriales" were copied directly from an Aztec screenfold prototype, and she succeeds in reconstructing a part of that model. Her close study reveals that the manuscript was painted in assembly-line fashion by six artists, some of whom also were the scribes who wrote the text.
Baird also shows that the "Primeros Memoriales", the earliest extant manuscript in which an extensive Nahuatl text is combined with a large number of drawings, marks a crucial transition between the idigenous conception of the book as pictorial and the European conception of the word-based book, in which pictures function only in relation to the text, as illustrations or decorations. Baird's study permits a critical use of the "Primeros Memoriales" for archaeological, art-historical and ethnohistorical study.
