BOOK: Flickering Creations Concepts of Nahua Precious Art

 

Hardcover

Price:

$65.00/£55.00

ISBN:

Published:

Oct 27, 2026

Copyright:

2026

Pages:

320

Size:

7.5 x 9.5 in.

Illus:

95 color + 2 b/w illus. 13 tables.

For the Nahua people of the Aztec Empire, precious things such as feathers, stones, and gold—known in the Nahuatl language as tlazohtli—were central to their understanding of the material world and their place in it. Flickering Creations reconstructs the Indigenous Nahua genre of precious art, revealing the aesthetic concepts that informed how artists worked with these vibrant, living, and emotionally compelling materials.

In this beautifully illustrated book, Allison Caplan presents new readings of major artworks of the Aztec Empire, drawing on Nahuatl alphabetic and glyphic writings to show how Nahuas of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries possessed their own art theory. She traces how key principles of precious art—tonalli (solar animacy), ixnezcayotl (appearance), *xiptli (skin), and nechihchihualiztli (assemblage)—indelibly shaped surviving masterpieces of feather, turquoise mosaic, and cast gold. Bridging art history, anthropology, linguistics, and literary studies, Caplan demonstrates how the creation and reception of exquisite works of precious art centered on activating and dynamically transforming their relationships to one another, their makers, their audience, and the wider world.

Providing a model for engaging with Indigenous material culture on its own terms, Flickering Creations shows how this previously unrecognized body of theory unveils entirely new dimensions of artistry and meaning in Nahua art.

AUTHOR

Allison Caplan is assistant professor of the history of art at Yale University.

PRAISE

“This is one of the most exciting, rigorous, and theoretically productive works to be published in Mesoamerican art history in recent decades. At a moment when it is increasingly important to honor Indigenous perspectives, Caplan presents an original analysis of Nahua aesthetic theory through exquisitely close readings of texts and objects. Flickering Creations is a work of breathtaking originality and field-defining scope.”—Claudia Brittenham, author of Unseen Art: Making, Vision, and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica

“A truly novel study that sets entirely new standards for analyzing Indigenous art. Flickering Creations is an extraordinary work that goes far beyond the dominant academic paradigms in Nahua studies and Mesoamerican art history.”—Justyna Olko, author of Insignia of Rank in the Nahua World: From the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century