Dr. Patrick Hajovsky, Associate Professor of Art History at Southwestern University, is to be congratulated on the release of his new book On the Lips of Others: Moteuczoma’s Fame in Aztec Monuments and Rituals. The book is published by University of Texas Press.

 

An excerpt from the text:

 

“Moteuczoma, the second Aztec king of this name, was born in 1467 and ruled from 1502 to 1520, when he died while held captive by his Spanish adversaries. Because of his defeat in the Conquest of Mexico, his fame is more widespread than that of any of his predecessors. The pages that follow set out to show how sculptures that contain this king’s name hieroglyph conjure indigenous notions of power as invested in the title of the Aztec royal office, huei tlahtoani ‘Great Speaker’. This title is composed of the verb tlahtoa ‘he
speaks [of things]’ with an agentive marker -ni (a ‘doer’ of the verb). Adding huei (Great) conveys the king’s authority to speak on all matters and that his words were carried out by lesser leaders who served him throughout his territory. Throughout this book I suggest that the king’s title and his person were merged into an aspect of fame very much unlike that which he received under the pens and paintbrushes of colonialperiod writers and artists. This sense of fame, expressed here as a duality of Aztec visual and oral cultures, ties several indigenous notions of kingship to the ritualized appearances and stone representations of Moteuczoma.”

A Review:

“This book offers significant new insights into a key corpus of Aztec sculpture and, more important, into the Aztec cultural constructions and understandings of personhood, portraiture, and rulership, specifically through the artistic patronage and representations of Moteuczoma II, the last of the Aztec emperors… . Dr. Hajovsky’s scholarship is careful and rigorous, and it deftly balances detailed analysis of evidence, physical and textual, with interpretation and speculation.”


—Eduardo de J. Douglas, Associate Professor of Art History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of In the Palace of Nezahualcoyotl: Painting Manuscripts, Writing the Pre-Hispanic Past in Early Colonial Period Tetzcoco, Mexico