Among the rich holdings of the Biblioteca Marciana on the Piazza di San Marco in Venice are five volumes of sheets containing a total of 1,028 drawings of plants by various hands, including more than 40 plants from the Americas. This is already enough to make them interesting to Latin Americanist scholars, but the big surprise comes when you open the so-called Blue Book (Libro azzurro). On the very first folio you see a tree bearing red fruit directly from its branches, with four oversized butterflies poised in the air or perched on a branch in a very non-naturalistic way.

If you continue to leaf through the 161 pages of the Blue Book, no fewer than 11 tree images share these same peculiar stylistic characteristics. Besides grasshoppers, butterflies and other insects, they feature various exotic birds, a lizard and an animal similar to an opossum. Their primary activity is eating: in one of the images a bird of prey is eating an insect, while a lizard hungrily eyes an epiphyte orchid or, more probably, something edible inside it. The trees themselves are all fruit-bearing, and grasshoppers formed an important part of the Mesoamerican diet.

To anyone familiar with the work of indigenous painters in Central America, these 11 images have a decidedly American look about them. But what are they doing in this collection of botanical drawings in Venice?

The compiler of the volumes is known to us. Pier’Antonio Michiel was born to an aristocratic family in Venice in 1510. He kept a garden next to his home in which he acclimatised, cultivated and reproduced many of the plants described in the five volumes, and he became so knowledgeable in botany that in 1551 he was made superintendent of the botanical garden founded six years earlier in the University of Padua, a position that ensured frequent contact with the leading authorities on plants of his day. He died during the plague epidemic of 1576.

This brief biographical outline gives us a date for the formation of the collection somewhere in the third quarter of the 16th century, with a cut-off around 1570, when he had decided to have the work printed (although it never was). Further information is available from the comments that Michiel wrote on the verso of each sheet. Those from the first sheet of the volume state:

This painting was brought from India together with ten other trees, as you will see here, to his imperial majesty, where the spokesman for his majesty at the time, Marc’Antonio da Mula, who is now a cardinal, had copies made from those of his majesty, and I took the present paintings from these.¹

From these words we can deduce that the 11 images in question are the result of two successive copying operations. Original paintings done in ‘India’, i.e. the Americas, were taken to the court of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V (Charles I of Spain). Copies of these were made for Marcantonio da Mula, and a second series of copies were made from these in turn for Pier’Antonio Michiel, which are the ones he included in his Blue Book.

Marcantonio da Mula, who was born in Venice in 1506, belonged to the erudite humanistic circles of the time and was the ambassador of the Venetian Republic at the court of Charles V, later rising to hold important positions in papal Rome, where he was in charge of the Vatican Library until his death in 1572. He is particularly interesting in the present context for his connection with indigenous American painting: in the case of copies of images from the codex variously known as Codex Vaticanus 3738, Codex Vaticanus A and Codex Ríos, it was da Mula who functioned as the intermediary between the arrival in Europe of these images of American origin and copies taken from them for a work by the humanist scholar Lorenzo Pignoria published in Padua in 1615.

So far, we have a route for the transmission of American images from the Americas via Spain to Venice and Padua. Matters, however, are not that simple. Another Italian collector and expert on the natural world, Ulisse Aldrovandi, outstripped Michiel by far with the almost three thousand watercolours now contained in 18 volumes in the Bologna University Library. Four of these images correspond to four of the 11 American images in Michiel’s Blue Book. However, they are not a perfect match; sometimes one of Aldrovandi’s paintings is more detailed, sometimes it is one of Michiel’s that yields fuller information. This would seem to rule out the possibility that one set was copied from the other.

Light is thrown on the question by a letter that Aldrovandi wrote to the grand duke of Tuscany in September 1577. On one of these paintings of a tree (the Persea), he comments, ‘I received the painting from Portugal and some Spaniards call it Quoyaud colorado’, and on two others (Berberis America and Acacia Americana) he states that he received them ‘from Lisbon many years ago’.²

So, at the risk of confusing the reader even more, we have to introduce a further series of copies. Aside from the American originals and the copies of them made in Spain for da Mula and Michiel, we now have to add the copies made for Aldrovandi that, he claimed, had come via Portugal, as well as at least one reproduction that Aldrovandi had made from one of his own copies for the grand duke of Tuscany in Florence.

Much has been written on the expedition of Francisco Hernández to collect information about the natural world of New Spain (present-day Mexico) for the Spanish monarch Philip II between 1570 and 1577, as well as on the subsequent fate of the Hernández material after it reached Europe. However, the images in the collections of Pier’Antonio Michiel in Venice and Ulisse Aldrovandi in Bologna show that there was a lively interest in American naturalia and an extensive circulation of images of them between the Iberian and Italian peninsulas before Hernández had even set foot in Mexico. Indeed, Aldrovandi was already agitating for an expedition to the Americas in the 1560s.

On the basis of stylistic considerations and of the words of Pier’Antonio Michiel himself, it may be assumed that the 11 trees represented in Michiel’s Blue Book are American. Although the names that Michiel provides, such as Quayautl colorado and Quahuxilots, seem to be derived from Nahuatl, one of the indigenous languages of Mexico, it is obvious that whoever transcribed them on the pages in the Blue Book was ignorant of Nahuatl, and it would be hazardous to attempt to identify the species with any degree of certainty. One tree image in particular, however, does offer a further clue. The tree on folio 67 is named ‘Cacao blanco da Indiani overo Spagnioli’ (‘white cacao by the Indians or Spaniards’), written in a curious code Michiel used that reversed the direction of each letter. We see a tree (like the others, depicted without roots) with a profusion of green or greenish-blue leaves (the indigenous languages of Mesoamerica do not distinguish between these two colours) and red-brownish fruits, around which are flitting four butterflies and several other insects. As the name indicates, in this case it is not difficult to recognise a (schematic) image of a cacao tree.

Michiel’s commentary states that ‘it was transported from India by painting to Spain’ and that ‘its fruits are like figs’. Because it is a New World species unknown to the Old World before the European discovery of America, Michiel falls back on a comparison between the unfamiliar (cacao) and the familiar (figs). Yet he has to add the rider: ‘but upside down with pointed tips of a yellow colour with purple that kindles your appetite when you look at them’. So they resemble figs, but there are differences. Faced with the limitations of verbal descriptions when it came to explaining the novelties of tropical flora to a European audience, the first author to write a natural history of the New World, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478–1557), had recommended visual representation: ‘It should rather be painted by the hand of Berruguete or another excellent painter like him, or by that of Leonardo da Vinci or Andrea Mantegna, famous painters whom I knew in Italy.’³ For the same reason, Aldrovandi’s planned expeditionary force to the New World would have included painters as well as writers. Even if the taste and smell of cacao fruits could not be conveyed in words, the vivid colours of Michiel’s painting ‘transported from India to Spain’ represented a serious attempt to bridge the gap visually.

There is an enigmatic detail that this folio does not share with any of the others. The sheet is torn along the bottom edge so that we do not know exactly what was depicted beneath the tree, but still visible is a cord-like vertical line connecting the base of the trunk with what looks somewhat like a cartoon version of the head of a dog. Consultation of an expert on Mexican codices revealed that it represents the dog-headed Mexican god Xólotl, depicted with a vertical black stripe running through the eye and an ear ornament (nacochtli). Whatever the function of this dog’s head may be in the present case (it may be a toponym), the presence of an image of Xólotl on this page of the Blue Book is evidence that the original was painted by an indigenous artist in Mexico, even though its significance will have remained completely bewildering to the European copyist. This is perhaps what has preserved it for us, for in other cases the copyist may have simplified or suppressed the roots of the trees and any pictographic glyphs that may have been present because they were incomprehensible to him. Likewise, the lines of red ants that appear below a painting of a cactus in the Aztec herbal from 1552 known as the Codex Cruz-Badianus (written in Nahuatl by the native convert Martín de la Cruz in Tlatelolco and translated into Latin by another student at the college called Juan Badiano) are meant to indicate that the plant grows near anthills, but in reducing the number of ants to two, the artist of a copy of the codex made in Rome for Cassiano dal Pozzo in 1626–7 has rendered this detail meaningless. The history of the circulation of images is rife with such misunderstandings.

Stylistic comparison with other paintings done directly by indigenous artists or on the basis of their products in colonial Mexico (such as the Codex Cruz-Badianus, the Florentine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagún, or the Relaciones geográficas) points to the Valley of Mexico as the site of production of the originals from which Michiel’s and Aldrovandi’s copies were indirectly taken. The closest parallel is to be found in the decoration of the Convent of San Salvador in Malinalco, some 100 kilometres southwest of Mexico City, where cacao and several more of the trees and the fauna that eat their fruits (or one another) that we find in the Blue Book were painted on the walls. These parallels date from the last quarter of the 16th century, while the copies made for da Mula were done in the 1550s, but in a region where styles did not change overnight we should not shrink from comparisons between materials some two or three decades apart.

It is true that the cacao tree’s primary zone was in the wet tropical lowlands of Yucatán rather than in the drier Valley of Mexico, but its presence in the Malinalco paintings and in the Florentine Codex is evidence that it was known in the Valley. Indeed, the small insect seen in the Blue Book image flying towards a flower that emerges from the trunk on the lower right suggests that the painter was aware that cacao flowers are pollinated not by hummingbirds or butterflies but by small insects. Moreover, given the importance of cacao drink as a beverage and stimulant as well as its use in indigenous religious rites, it is unthinkable that the tree would have been unknown to an artist in central Mexico.

As for the date of production of the original paintings, once again the head of Xólotl affords a clue. Parallels exist in other Mexican codices, but one of the closest is in the Codex Mendoza, now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Antonio de Mendoza was viceroy in Mexico from 1535 to 1550; his son Francisco commissioned the Codex Cruz-Badianus around 1552 and took a lively interest in the acclimatisation of oriental plants in America for commercial purposes. It is not hard to imagine that Francisco de Mendoza would have shown particular interest in a group of images representing trees that produced edible fruit.

There is a further, Venetian twist to the tale. Francisco’s uncle, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, was appointed imperial ambassador to Venice in 1539, where he indulged in his passion for collecting books and manuscripts, including works on natural history and a herbarium (kept since 1576 in the Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial). It seems plausible that the link between these 11 paintings produced in the Valley of Mexico and the arrival of copies of (copies of) them via Spain or Portugal in Venice, Bologna and Florence – 10,000 kilometres away from their place of origin – was the Mendoza family. The lives and travels of images are fascinating enough in themselves, but the character, interests and activities of those through whose hands they passed are an important part of the story too. Their conscious or unconscious interpretations, their selective biases, their mental horizons all left their marks on the reception history of those images. Like so many other images of New World objects, Pier’Antonio Michiel’s painted cacao tree in Venice and his comments on it bear the traces of those various hands.

FURTHER READING

De Toni, E. (1940) Pietro Antonio Michiel: i cinque libri delle piante (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti).

Egmond, F. (2017) Eye for Detail: Images of Plants and Animals in Art and Science, 1500–1630 (London: Reaktion Books).

López García, J., and O. Muñoz (eds.) (2019) Utopismos circulares: contextos amerindios de la modernidad (Madrid: Iberoamericano/Vervuert).

Mason, P. (2001) The Lives of Images (London: Reaktion Books).

Mason, P. (2009) Before Disenchantment: Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World (London: Reaktion Books).

Olmi, G., and G. Papagno (eds.) (2006) La natura e il corpo: studi in memoria di Attilio Zanca (Florence: Leo Olschki).

Peterson, J.F. (1993) The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco: Utopia and Empire in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press).

¹ P.’A. Michiel, I cinque libri delle piante. Libro Azzurro, fol. 1v.

² A. Tosi (ed.), Ulisse Aldrovandi e la Toscana: Carteggio e testimonianze documentarie (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1989), 224–31.

³ G.F. de Oviedo y Valdés, ‘Prohemio’, Historia general y natural de las Indias, J. Amador de los Ríos (ed.) (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1851), pt 1, book 10, 362.