• 1 Western organology classifies such an instrument as a rasp, that is, an indirectly struck idiophon (...)

2Research into documentary sources in Italian archives has shown that, once in Italy, the femur passed through various collections in Rome, Bologna, and then back to Rome, where it is now kept in the Museo delle Civiltà together with the cut Oliva sp. shell that was used to scrape the notched surface of the bone to produce the sound (Domenici 2016).1 Conversely, the associated mosaic-encrusted skull is now lost and at the time of publication of the abovementioned studies no information was available on its Italian whereabouts.

• 2 On Ulisse Aldrovandi, see Fantuzzi 1774; Findlen 1994; Olmi 1976, 1992; Mason 2023; Scappini and T (...)
• 3 Twelve pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican items were published in Aldrovandi’s Musaeum Metallicum (1648). R (...)

5Ulisse Aldrovandi was a famous Late Renaissance scholar, versed in several branches of “natural history” and particularly interested in naturalia and artificialia proceeding from the recently “discovered” Americas.2 Aldrovandi also amassed a vast collection of both natural and artificial specimens, painted illustrations, and books that included at least 13 pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican artifacts, as well as some colonial Mesoamerican ones and some other objects from Brazil (Domenici 2022a).3

• 4 Aldrovandi had already visited Cavalieri’s palace in 1549-1550 to study his collection of classica (...)
• 5 On Tommaso de’ Cavalieri and his art collection, see, among others, Frommel 1979; Perrig 1979; Pan (...)
• 6 Tommaso de’ Cavalieri’s collection of exotica, as recorded in Ms. Aldr. 143/3, has been previously (...)

6In 1576-1577, Aldrovandi traveled to Rome to meet his relative Pope Gregory XIII (Fantuzzi 1774, p. 46-47). During his stay, he visited churches, gardens, and museums, recording detailed, inventory-like, lists of specimens of interest. Among these collections was that of the Roman nobleman Tommaso de’ Cavalieri.4 Tommaso also owned a renowned art collection, including some famous drawings that Michelangelo had gifted him (in various versions) between 1532 and 1535.5 Tommaso himself wrote to Michelangelo that one of the versions of the Fall of Phaeton had been seen by prestigious visitors such as Pope Clement VII (Giulio de’ Medici) and Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici (Marongiu 2013, p. 260-263). Less well known is that Tommaso also possessed a substantial collection of mostly non-European artificialia and naturalia, including several Mesoamerican artifacts, as attested by the Aldrovandian manuscripts and a brief mention in Aldrovandi’s Ornithologiae (1599).6

• 7 A complete transcription of Aldrovandi’s lists of Tommaso de Cavalieri’s collection in BUB Ms. Ald (...)

7The vast corpus of Aldrovandi’s manuscripts now held in the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna (BUB) contains at least three different copies of the lists describing the Cavalieri collection, as well as several brief, index-like references to its contents. While in Rome, Aldrovandi must have penned a now-lost list of the artifacts, books, plants, animals, and minerals which he saw in Roman collections, libraries, churches, and gardens. Back in Bologna, he had the list clean copied by a scribe in vol. 6 of Ms. Aldr. 136 (Observationes), under the heading of Itinerarium seu rerum in itinere florentino, romano et tyburtino collectarum catalogus (starting from fol. 83r). Within the list, the Cavalieri collection is described twice: in a first list of 63 items (fols. 97r-100v) and a in second list of 27 items already recorded in the previous list but now described in more detail (fols. 120r-123v). The text shows several corrections, some of which were penned by Aldrovandi himself, arguably when checking the work of the copyist. At the same time, several of the objects were recorded on paper slips that were glued in alphabetical order to the pages of Ms. Aldr. 145/1, which is an alphabetical index of the Observationes. Then, at an unknown time, the two lists from Ms. Aldr. 136/6 were copied—incorporating the corrections traced on Ms. Aldr. 136/6, with minimal differences and with a change in the order and division of the entries, probably due to a scribal error—in Ms. Aldr. 143/3 (Peregrinarum rerum catalogi), under the heading of Romae catalogus (fols. 143v-145v, 154r-154v, 156v-159v). Then, between 1581 and 1584, some of Cavalieri’s items—those that Aldrovandi himself had ticked on Ms. Aldr. 136/6, plus a few others—were copied again in two different lists in Ms. Aldr. 34/2 (Admirandorum naturae et artis historia) in a section titled De admirandis. Finally, two of the Cavalieri objects were also recorded in the Pandechion epistemonicon (Ms. Aldr. 105, vol. LA-LECT), another alphabetical list of objects where relevant bibliographic sources and cross-references to Ms. Aldr. 136/6 were also recorded. Due to this complex working method, each of the objects in the Cavalieri collection is recorded in several entries, from a minimum of three to a maximum of eight. In the following discussion, I will rely mainly on the two earlier lists from the Itinerarium seu rerum in itinere florentino, romano et tyburtino collectarum catalogus (Ms. Aldr. 136/6), adding information from other manuscripts only when relevant.7

• 8 This is a specimen of the Reversus piscis aculeatus depicted in a watercolor in Aldrovandi’s colle (...)
• 9 Lapis ad dolorem iliacum colore subviridi, qui Indis Cralhuil .i. pietra di Dio (BUB, Ms. Aldr. 13 (...)
• 10 A similar copying error seems to have occurred in the entries about the Uromastyx, which is said t (...)

10The American natural specimens included parts of two toucans (called Rhomphastis and Pica Bressilia), an iguana (Uromastyx), a spiny fish (Reversus piscis),8 an Indian gourd (Cucurbita indica), and several greenstones or jades, which Aldrovandi called Lapis viridis (“green stone”), Lapis nephriticus (“kidney stone,” from Greek νεφρός), Lapis ad dolorem iliacum utilissimus (“stone very useful for iliac pain”), or Lapis renali (“kidney stone,” from Latin renes), thus reflecting early modern ideas about the medicinal properties of greenstones (e.g., Monardes 1565). Interestingly, the Lapis ad dolorem iliacum utilissimus is said to be called in “Indian language” Cralhuil/Cialzuil.9 These terms seem to be erroneous copies of an original Cialhuil,10 which in turn is an imprecise transcription of the Nahuatl term chalchihuitl. Aldrovandi translated the indigenous term into Italian as pietra di Dio, “God’s stone.” To my knowledge, such a (wrong) translation is not attested in any 16th-century source that Aldrovandi could have read. It is therefore possible that he learned the indigenous term and its presumed translation in Cavalieri’s house, where—as we will see below—he also collected other indigenous names.

• 11 Idola indica ex lapide pretioso ad renalem dolorem utilissimo (fol. 98v). When not explicitly stat (...)
• 12 Paropsis ex cucurbita indica (fol. 98v); Paropsis ex cucurbita Indica in qua conspiciuntur variae (...)
• 13 Clypei contexti ex varijs avium plumis indicis confecti, intus vineis obiuncti (fol. 98v); Clypei (...)
• 14 Memini me, cum Romae essem, in musaeo percelebri illustris ac patritii ordinis viri D. Thomae Cava (...)
• 15 Ensis indica ex lignea quadam materia (fol. 98v).
• 16 Speculum naturale ex lapide Pyritide, quod veri hominis effigiem representat (fol. 99r); Speculum (...)
• 17 Novacula lapidea ad sacrificandum cadavera idolis (fol. 98r); Novacula lapidea quam ministri templ (...)
• 18 Lapis ex qua novacula. Rasoi di pietra per cavare il cuore del petto a’ quelli che sacrificano gli (...)
• 19 Persona antiqua ex varijs lapillis contexta (fol. 98v).
• 20 Tympanum Indicum ex ligno castanei coloris (fol. 98r); Tympanum Indicum ex ligno castanei coloris, (...)
• 21 Instrumenta aenea apud indos ad agricoltura apta (fol. 98v).
• 22 Figurae indicae variorium Sanctorum nempe Christi, eius matris, et Sanctorum Apostolorum Petri et (...)
• 23 Panis ex Iuca Indorum qui in multos conservatur annos instar biscotti (fol. 99v). In Ms. 34/2, the (...)

11This preponderance of Mesoamerican minerals and related linguistic data among the naturalia is reflected in the 13 entries that refer to American artifacts, as most—if not all—of them seem to be Mesoamerican. This is clearly the case with the greenstone sculptures described as “Indian idols made with a precious stone that is very useful against kidney pain,”11 or of the “cup of Indian gourd in which one can see various figures painted with different colors,”12 perhaps a painted or lacquered gourd of the kind known as xicalli in Nahuatl (Spanish: jícara; Italian: chicchera). Equally explicit is the mention of some “shields made with the feathers of various Indian birds tied to reeds,”13 already noticed in the academic literature because Aldrovandi himself mentioned them in the published volume of the Ornithologiae (Aldrovandi 1599, book 11, p. 656; Heikamp 1976, p. 461-462, n. 19).14 The entry mentioning the shields is immediately followed by the record of an “Indian sword made of a certain wood,”15 which could be a macuahuitl, even if it is surprising that—given Aldrovandi’s meticulous descriptive habit—the entry does not mention the obsidian blades that characterized this type of Aztec sword. Also consistent with a known type of Mesoamerican royal paraphernalia is the “Natural mirror of pyrite stone, which represents a real image of a man.”16 The fact that the “Small stone blade which the temples’ ministers used to sacrifice to the idols”17 refers to a Mesoamerican obsidian prismatic blade is confirmed by its mention in the alphabetical list of the Pandemion epistemonicon, where it is followed by the Italian sentence “Stone razors employed to extract the heart of those who are sacrificed by the Indians of New Spain, tom. 3° Navig. 188.”18 “Razors” (rasoi) is the term commonly employed in early modern Italian texts to refer to obsidian prismatic blades (which were actually used for bloodletting rather than for heart extraction; Domenici 2022b), while the latter part of the entry is a reference to the description of human sacrifice in Yucatan as recorded by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo in his Generale et naturale historia dell’Indie, published in the third volume of Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Navigationi et viaggi (Venice, 1565). Most likely Mesoamerican was also the “Indian alabaster vessel worked in the shape of an idol,” which may well have been a travertine (tecali) drinking vessel in the shape of a god or animal, of the type mostly manufactured in Puebla, Oaxaca, and the Gulf Coast (Pasztory 1983, p. 250). Also Mesoamerican might have been the mosaic mask described as “ancient mask made of various stones.”19 More tentative is the recognition of the “Indian drum” made of a dark, chestnut-like wood20 as a Mesoamerican drum, either vertical (huehuetl, in Nahuatl) or horizontal (teponaztli). If so, this would be the only mention of such a drum in an early modern European collection. An intriguing entry records “Bronze instruments used by the Indians in agricultural works.”21 Although at first glance such a mention hardly recalls known Mesoamerican artifacts, it probably refers to some agricultural tools whose arrival in Italy from Mexico had been recorded in the Descrittione dell’India occidentale (Domenici 2017), a source whose connections with Tommaso de’ Cavalieri’s collection will be discussed in more detail below. Clearly Mesoamerican—perhaps from Michoacan—were the only explicitly colonial artworks in Cavalieri’s American collection: “Indian figures of various saints, that is, Christ, his mother, and the Saint Apostles Peter and Paul, made with bird feathers.”22 Finally, a rather curious “artifact” is the “bread from Indian yucca, which can be preserved many years as biscuits,”23 clearly a cassava bread of the kind that was loaded as supplies on Spanish ships during their eastbound transatlantic voyages and that is often found in early modern European collections.

• 24 Cranei Indiani regis descriptio (fol. 120v).

13The most interesting information, however, concerns another Mesoamerican item in the collection, described by Aldrovandi in a long passage entitled “Description of the skull of an Indian king.”24 In order to fully understand its relevance, it is necessary to make a small detour regarding another Mesoamerican object that is now in Rome.

• 25 Cranei Indiani regis descriptio vide suo loco alphabetico (fol. 98r). Almost identical entries are (...)
• 26 Cranei indiani regis descriptio. Ut pateat crudelitas, qua Indiani Indiarum mundi novi utebantur s (...)

17Keeping in mind the curious history of this wandering “leg of an Indian king,” we can return to Aldrovandi’s description of the Cavalieri museum. Briefly mentioned in the first list (fol. 98r),25 the object of our interest is described in detail in the second list of Ms. Aldr. 136/6 (fols. 157v-158r) and in its two copies.26 Here follows an English translation of the text:

• 27 A few examples of most relevant similarities between the Italian text of the Descrittione and the (...)

18The content of Aldrovandi’s text makes it clear that the skull preserved in the house of Tommaso de’ Cavalieri was the same one that had been brought to Italy together with the femur and whose arrival had been recorded in the Descrittione dell’India occidentale. Moreover, the content and phrasing of the first section of Aldrovandi’s text strongly suggest that he read the Descrittione, since he recorded the same information (sometimes using almost identical language), also including rather stereotypical and gruesome colonial tropes about sacrifice, cannibalism, and indigenous cruelty.27 Nevertheless, in the final passage of his text, Aldrovandi recorded a wealth of additional information. Explicitly referencing an indigenous pictorial manuscript as a source, he added more details about the conflict mentioned in the Descrittione, providing a precise 14th-century date, the Nahuatl name of the defeated kingdom (Taxiaco, i.e., Tlaxiaco) and—even more surprisingly—the original Mixtec name of Tututepec (Uucu Zzaa, i.e., Yucu Dzaa, “Bird Mountain”), although these terms are apparently misunderstood as anthroponyms rather than place names. As none of these details are found in the Descrittione, we must assume that they had been somehow recorded by Tommaso de’ Cavalieri when he received the skull. Since no Italian individual in 16th-century Rome would have been able to read a Mixtec pictorial document (probably not even a glossed one), it is possible that the information was provided by the very missionary who brought the objects, who in turn would probably have needed an indigenous translator/mediator to grasp the content of indigenous historical records. It is difficult to imagine Tommaso de’ Cavalieri remembering by heart indigenous names several years after the object’s arrival in Rome, and so he may have recorded the information in a manuscript text that Aldrovandi might have consulted.

• 28 […] quod manibus meis contrectavi (Ms. Aldr. 34/2, fol. 415r).
• 29 On postclassic Mesoamerican mosaics, see, among others, Saville 1992; McEwan et. al. 2006; Izeki 2 (...)

19In the last lines of the text, we can recognize the typical descriptive habits of Aldrovandi, whose strong empiricism is further emphasized by a note that only appears in Ms. Aldr. 34/2: “I touched [the skull] with my hands.”28 Aldrovandi also mentioned the colors of the mosaic tesserae, thus allowing us to tentatively identify their component materials as turquoise and/or malachite (green), Spondylus princeps shell (red) and Pinctada mazatlanica, i.e., mother-of-pearl (yellow).29 Together with the almost completely worn mosaic-encrusted head of the femur in the Museo delle Civiltà, where only a few Spondylus and obsidian tesserae are still in place, this is the only existing information on Late Postclassic mosaics from the Coastal Mixteca, thus providing another valuable piece of information on indigenous technology and style.

• 30 The Monte Albán skull was first interpreted as a resonator by Javier Urcid (2010a, p. 140, fig. 14 (...)
• 31 After reading my 2016 article, Peter Mason observed that the interpretation of the skull as a cup, (...)
• 32 intus cranei est quod crateris loco utantur (Ms. Aldr. 34/2, fol. 415r).
• 33 André Thevet wrote about the creation of skull-cups as part of the Quetzalcoatl saga (Thevet 1905, (...)

20Aldrovandi’s synthetic description raises questions about the shape and function of the skull. In my previous articles based on the Descrittione dell’India occidentale (Domenici 2016, 2017), I suggested that the mention of the skull as a “cup” was a misinterpretation of a skull whose cranial vault had been cut off—as occurs in the mosaic-encrusted skulls (with sealed openings) found in Monte Albán Tomb 7 (Caso 1969, p. 62-69), Chichén Itzá (Moholy-Nagy and Ladd 1992, p. 132-140), and in other unprovenanced specimens—putting forward the hypothesis that it must have been the soundbox or resonator of the musical instrument.30 This hypothesis was based primarily on an image on p. 24 of the Mixtec pictorial manuscript known as Codex Vindononensis/Yuta Tnoho, where the cultural hero 9 Wind uses a scapula to rasp a notched femur resting on top of a human skull (Anders et al. 1992, p. 146-149).31 However, this hypothesis needs to be nuanced based on Aldrovandi’s words describing the skull as “concave, because they used it to drink” and stating (in Ms. Aldr. 34/2) that “inside the skull there is what they used instead of a cup.”32 This leads me to believe that the skull may have contained some kind of vessel-like implement, perhaps a gourd, an assemblage which could have functioned both as a resonator and as a cup. The use of a gourd as a resonator for an omichicahuaztli-like instrument among the Tarahumaras was described by Carl S. Lumholtz, as noticed by Hermann Beyer in an article precisely commenting on the image from Codex Vindobonensis, where the author also discusses the conceptual analogy between the gourd-like vessel (tecomate) and the skull, the latter being called in Nahuatl tzontecomatl, “hair tecomate” (Beyer 1916). The existence of Late Postclassic polychrome effigy vessels in the shape of skulls in both the Basin of Mexico and Cholula does not help to clarify this issue: even though at first glance they appear to be cups, Michael Lind interpreted them precisely as resonators (Lind 1994, p. 85, fig. 13). However, it is worth noting that there are mentions of skull-cups in the Mesoamerican ethnohistoric corpus, the most interesting being a passage in the Relación de Michoacán, where the text recounts the creation of a musical instrument with the thigh of a sacrificed man and the use of his skull as a cup (Alcalá 2000, p. 400-401).33 Until further evidence emerges, the precise function of cup-like skulls, both real and reproduced in pottery, remains an open problem.

• 34 I thank Maarten E. R. G. N. Jansen for pointing out to me the relevant passage in Burgoa’s work.
• 35 The royal dynasties of Tlaxiaco and Achiutla, which traced their origins to a same lord named 4 Wi (...)
• 36 On Achiutla in pre-Hispanic and early colonial times, see Forde 2015.
• 37 AGI-J 107, N/2, R/4, fol. 7. I am most grateful to Bas van Doesburg for drawing my attention to th (...)
• 38 On the early colonial history of Tututepec, see Woensdregt 1996; Van Doesburg 2022.

21The 1350 CE war between Tututepec and Tlaxiaco mentioned in Aldrovandi’s text is not recorded in the extant corpus of pre-Hispanic and early colonial Mixtec pictorial manuscripts, clearly indicating that the “Indian paintings” mentioned by Aldrovandi are today lost. Admittedly, we cannot even be sure that one such Mixtec historical codex—in which the event would have been dated according to the Mixtec calendar—ever arrived in Italy, since the fact that the memory of the war had been recorded in indigenous “paintings” could simply have been transmitted orally by the missionary (Juan de Córdova?) who brought the skull and femur and who might have also made the calendrical correlation. Be that as it may, what Aldrovandi recorded is a precious excerpt of Mixtec historiography, witnessing a hitherto unknown pre-colonial historical event. However, a passage from Francisco de Burgoa’s Geográfica descripción (1674) sheds some light on the broader political landscape in which such a war might have taken place.34 In a section devoted to the Mixtec town of Achiutla—a close ally of Tlaxiaco in both pre-Hispanic and colonial times35—the Dominican historian wrote that, according to indigenous pictorial histories, Achiutla (in an unspecified past) was asked by Tututepec to bring its products to the lowland market center of Putla, probably as a form of tribute. When the lords of Achiutla refused to comply, the king of Tututepec organized a military expedition that resulted in the siege of Achiutla and a battle in which 22,000 people were killed (Burgoa 1934 [1674], I, p. 352-353). Given the close political relationship between Achiutla and Tlaxiaco, the events recorded by Burgoa could be somehow related to the 1350 CE war mentioned by Aldrovandi, which could have been fought either as part of a conflict that initiated Achiutla’s submission to Tututepec, or after Achiutla’s “rebellion.”36 Whatever the case, it is important to emphasize that both Aldrovandi and Burgoa explicitly referred to indigenous historical codices as the ultimate sources of the information they transmitted. In addition, evidence of the rivalry between Tututepec, on the one hand, and Tlaxiaco, on the other, can be found in early colonial documents. In 1524, some lords of Tututepec traveling with Martín Vázquez—appointed as encomendero of Tlaxiaco—were killed in Tlaxiaco on the orders of the local ruler, who was then captured and taken to Tututepec (Van Doesburg 2022, p. 39, n. 129). In the 1529 document in which Martín Vázquez recorded the event, the lords of Tututepec and Tlaxiaco are described as “mortal enemies” (henemigos mortales).37 In a 1544 inquisitorial trial, it is said that the Zapotec rulers of Coatlan, who were in constant conflict with Tututepec, used to invite the lords of various Mixtec communities, including Tlaxiaco and Achiutla, to their ceremonies (González Pérez 2019, p. 90). All the available data seem to outline a late pre-Hispanic/early colonial political landscape characterized by the aggressive expansionism of Tututepec and by the resistance of several Mixtec and Zapotec communities such as Tlaxiaco, Achiutla, Coatlan, and Tehuantepec.38

• 39 It is worth remembering here that Michelangelo died in February 1564, so that is unlikely that he (...)

27When in the house of Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, as already noted by Detlef Heikamp in his comment on the shields mentioned in the Ornithologiae (Heikamp 1976, p. 461-462), Mesoamerican artifacts shared the same exhibition space with drawings by Michelangelo Buonarroti and other Western artworks, so that learned visitors might have contemplated them together and listened to stories about their origin and creation.39 In that same space, Aldrovandi lucidly described the Cavalieri collection through synthetic inventory-like entries, devoting a long passage to the tragic story of the king of Tlaxiaco. This surprising fact nuances the common view that early modern European collectors almost always incurred in misattributions and misunderstandings that obscured cultural specificities and contributed to the creation of a homogenizing and exoticist view of non-European peoples (e.g., Bleichmar 2021). At least as far as early modern Italian collections are concerned, such phenomena seem to have characterized 17th-century collections such as the one assembled by Ferdinando Cospi in Bologna more than 16th-century ones, often assembled and/or described by natural historians and physicians such as Aldrovandi. Indeed, Aldrovandi’s text seems to commingle different but deeply intertwined textual traditions. On the one hand, it is easy to recognize typical colonial tropes that obsessively focused on indigenous sacrifice and cannibalism, most probably directly drawn from the Descrittione dell’India occidentale. On the other hand, Aldrovandi’s text is full of Nahuatl and Mixtec terms and excerpts of indigenous historiographic knowledge that were ultimately derived from indigenous manuscripts and then remained somehow “attached” to indigenous artifacts even after their long transatlantic voyage. This is not to downplay the epistemic violence which accompanied the European appropriation of indigenous things, or to sketch a hagiographic portrait of early modern scholars like Aldrovandi. Rather, the case study discussed in this article allows us to gain a more nuanced understanding of early modern collecting practices and to consider how indigenous knowledge and social memory were able to seep “between the lines” of European colonial discourses, thanks to the activities of indigenous mediators, Christian missionaries, and European collectors and scholars. For this reason, the study of early modern collecting of indigenous American things is not doomed to be limited to the exploration of the often-distorted European views of the indigenous world. Rather, it can also shed light on indigenous memory and cultural practices. Seen in this light, the indigenous things that were brought to Europe in early modern times seem to have retained part of their original power, partially overcoming the violence of their appropriation. If we give them the attention they deserve, as Ulisse Aldrovandi certainly did, they can still tell surprising stories. We do not know where the skull of the King of Tlaxiaco ended up after the dispersal of the Cavalieri collection, but perhaps one day it will reappear to be reunited with his femur, becoming capable again of emitting its energy-inducing sound and telling more fascinating stories.