Tesoro Deluxe? The Copper Engravings for the Accademia dei Lincei’s Natural History of Mexico

In 1651, the Roman Accademia dei Lincei published its long-awaited encyclopedia of the natural history of Mexico, known as the Tesoro messicano. The book was based on texts and color drawings that were produced in the 1570s in Mexico by the Spanish royal physician Francisco Hernández with the participation of indigenous informants, but it contains substantial additions by the Lincei in the form of commentaries, annotations, and circa eight hundred woodcut illustrations. Whereas the Lincei’s writings have received extensive scholarly attention, the illustrations of the Mexican plants and animals remain an understudied aspect of this important book for the early modern understanding of natural history. This holds even more for the five folio-size copper engravings that were inserted post-printing in a limited number of the surviving copies of the Tesoro messicano.
These copper engravings depict Mexican plants that were already represented in the Tesoro by woodcuts, such as the Coanenepilli (Passionflower) and the Hoaxacan (Holywood), but with added details and with more suggestion of depth, color, and volume through shading. The copies of the Tesoro with the engravings constitute a more luxurious edition of the book, the existence of which has so far not been noted in scholarly publications. The paper first discusses the basic questions surrounding the engravings: by whom, when, and for what kind of audience were they produced? Due of a lack of primary written sources, the answers to these questions will be based on visual analyses of the engravings. In the second part of the paper, the engravings are compared with the woodcuts of the same plants. It is argued that this comparison furthers our understanding of the function of the images in the Tesoro and their relationships to the text, which is the main aim of the paper.