Page 292 - The Secret Museum

empire, now Mexico City.

The glyphs of places on the lienzo have been matched up to towns and villages of

today, and their arrangement on it corresponds to their arrangement in the actual
landscape: the lienzo is also a map. Some of the rulers’ buildings and churches
drawn on this one still exist today.

The whole thing was created by the Mixtec to record the story of their people, to
show that their rulers were legitimate, and that their power had been felt in the area
right back to the beginning of time. It was created around the time the Spanish
conquistadors arrived in the country, in response to the dramatic changes this caused
in the region. Neither the Aztec conquest of the region (1458–62) nor the Spanish

conquest (1519–21) is drawn on the lienzo.
Until the Spanish arrived, the Aztecs had ruled over the Mixtecs, demanding

tribute from them in the form of gold, turquoise, woven clothing and quetzal feathers.
When the Spaniards came, they embarked on a profound reorganization of the native
culture, including their religion and settlement patterns. They also brought awful
diseases. Recent archaeological research suggests the population of Coixtlahuaca
may have dropped during the sixteenth century from perhaps 75,000 to just a few
thousand people. (Today, the valley holds only small villages, since many native

people have decided to migrate elsewhere.)
There are 11 extant lienzos from this area of Mexico, painted by the valley’s

Chocho and Mixtec inhabitants in the decades after the Spanish conquered Mexico.
They were created because the ruling houses were trying to preserve their status and
hold their communities together in the face of all the turmoil created by outsiders.
This beautiful lienzo, which lives wrapped in pillows, is the largest, most
comprehensive and most highly prized of them all.

When the ROM purchased it from Constantine Rickards, the British consul
general, they did not know it had been stolen. It came into their collection in 1919
and for a long time its origins were obscure. Decades later, a music journalist from

Toronto, Ross Parmenter, became interested in the lienzo and decided to work out
where it was from. He ended up in the village of Tlapiltepec, where an elderly man
remembered it having been stolen by a legal assistant who had been working on a
land dispute case between the village and two neighbouring villages. The lienzo was
key evidence. The legal assistant stole it and sold it for 400 pesos to Rickards, who
sold it on to the ROM.

They recently decided to create a lifesize version of it, as it would have looked, in
its original colours, so that visitors to the ROM would be able to learn about the

lienzo that lives in storage. This was a tricky task, as the colours have faded so much
that today all you can see on the original are the black outlines of the glyphs, drawn
in soot made from burnt bones or wood.

They also used a 1910 tracing of the lienzo they had found in Berlin, and