Shannah Rose is the 2025 Samuel H. Kress Foundation | Marian and Andrew Heiskell Rome Prize Fellow in Renaissance and early modern studies and a PhD candidate in the history of art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She specializes in the visual and material culture of colonial Latin America, early modern Italy, and the Iberian Peninsula. Her dissertation, The Codex Ríos (Codex Vaticanus A) and the Reception of Mesoamerican Pictography in Early Modern Italy, focuses on the production and translation of illustrated codices in sixteenth-century Mexico and their reception and reproduction in early modern Italy. Rose earned an MA in the history of art and Latin American studies at Tulane University and a BFA in printmaking and BA in the history of art, both from the University of Virginia.
Your dissertation focuses on the Codex Ríos and its copies as sites of cultural negotiation and mediation in sixteenth-century Mexico and Italy. What makes this manuscript unique, and why is it central to understanding the reception of Mesoamerican religion and culture in early modern Italy?
The Codex Ríos (Vat.lat.3738, also known as the Codex Vaticanus A.) is an endlessly fascinating document. Held in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana since its arrival in Italy in the 1560s, it is the only surviving colonial Mexican pictorial manuscript to feature a comprehensive textual account in Italian of the religion, culture, and customs of the Nahua, commonly referred to as the Aztecs. Nahua tlahcuilohque (painter-scribes) created the manuscript under the behest of Dominican friars in central Mexico (New Spain) in the mid-sixteenth century, and it contains texts and images on 101 folios of imported Fabriano paper. The tlahcuilohque produced the Codex Ríos as an augmented reproduction and translation of an earlier colonial Mexican manuscript, the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, and the scribes intended the Codex Ríos to be a clean copy of its prototype for a non-Indigenous, Italian readership.
In the tradition of other colonial-era Mexican manuscripts, the Codex Ríos comprises multiple sections of images with accompanying textual commentary and glosses. These include the Indigenous tonalamatl (divinatory almanac), xiuhpohualli (solar calendar), and the pictorial year count characteristic of pre-Hispanic Aztec codices. Two new sections are unique to the Codex Ríos as they were not included in the manuscript’s model. One section depicts the cosmological and mythological traditions of ancient Mesoamerica; importantly, this cosmology contains the only known images of the Aztec celestial layers. The second section is a proto-ethnography that details sacrificial and mortuary customs with native figural types. These additions to the Codex Ríos serve as valuable records of the Italian reception of Aztec religion and culture roughly thirty years after the onset of European settler-colonialism in New Spain.
The manuscript’s location in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana gave it special visibility, particularly among elite circles connected to the Vatican. This tightly knit intellectual circle added another intriguing chapter to the manuscript’s object biography: when it arrived in Italy in the 1560s, the codex operated within a unique social context that dictated its subsequent reception history, or what I refer to as the manuscript’s “reproductive afterlife.” Central to this story are the Roman antiquarians who reproduced the Codex Ríos’s images and texts in several printed books and hand-illustrated manuscripts. My Rome Prize allowed me to consult these documents firsthand and paint a more complete picture of how the system of Mesoamerican pictography—writing with images—was (mis)interpreted and translated in early modern Italy.
The Codex Ríos contains illustrations and descriptions in Nahuatl and Italian of Indigenous cosmology and customs. What do these depictions and translations reveal about the ways Italians understood and reinterpreted Nahua culture?
What drew me to this subject is a fascination with how people make sense of cultural difference through images and texts. At a very basic level, we do this today (often subconsciously) through comparison and heuristics. The early modern period was no different, particularly when it came to Europeans’ “discovery” of and interactions with communities and materials from the Indigenous Americas. The Codex Ríos’s two new sections—the cosmology and what I call the “proto-ethnography”—represent this confluence of worldviews through a combination of glyphs that are distinctly Indigenous and alphabetic texts that are distinctly European.
For now, I won’t reveal too much of my research on this topic; you can read more in two publications I finished while I was at the Academy. I have a chapter, “Reproducing Mesoamerican Cosmologies and Customs in the Codex Ríos (Codex Vaticanus A),” in a forthcoming volume with Brill, in addition to several essays I contributed to the catalogue for the exhibition Barocco globale: Il mondo a Roma nel secolo di Bernini, which opened at the Scuderie del Quirinale while I was in Rome.
Where have you conducted research, and what is your most surprising discovery?
I had a lot of fun (and practiced a lot of patience) hunting down various rare books, manuscripts, and copies of the Codex Ríos during my fellowship. I am thankful for the professional relationships I cultivated over the year, which were key to accessing these precious documents. For example, at AAR’s Barbara Goldsmith Rare Book Room, Paolo Imperatori and Sebastian Hierl generously allowed me to regularly consult several editions of Vincenzo Cartari and Lorenzo Pignoria’s mythological treatise Imagini de gli dei delli antichi. It was such a privilege to have these books just two flights of stairs away from my office. In Rome, I frequented the Biblioteca Angelica and the Biblioteca Casanatense for manuscripts. I also transcribed inventories and avvisi at the Archivio di Stato and completed secondary research at the Bibliotheca Hertziana. Most importantly, with the help of Dr. Claudia Montuschi at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, I studied the Codex Ríos with my own eyes on several occasions!
Beyond Rome, I consulted other Mexican manuscripts and related copies and documents at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, and the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. I cannot possibly pin down the most exciting discovery from my manuscript adventures—each day brought new insights and observations. As an art historian and trained printmaker, I know intuitively that digital reproductions and facsimiles mediate our somatic interactions with objects, obscuring our understanding of their materiality and facture. I suppose, then, I am surprised that before my time at the Academy, I had never fully considered how scale factors into my study of Mexican manuscripts and early modern reproductive technologies. For example, compared to their cognates in the Codex Ríos, the size of the printed images from Cartari and Pignoria and the watercolor images from the Biblioteca Angelica manuscripts tells me so much about the methods Roman antiquarians used to make their copies. One simply cannot make these observations and inferences with digitizations or facsimiles.
How have your interactions with this year’s Fellows and Residents influenced your work or changed your perspective?
Every single one of the 2024–25 Fellows, Fellow Travelers, and Residents challenged me to push the theoretical and disciplinary boundaries of my research. On a personal level, I cannot imagine my life without them, and I will always treasure the ten months we shared on the Gianicolo. It sounds cliché, but it’s true! For one year, I lived with and worked alongside passionate writers, visionary artists and musicians, and expert archaeologists, epigraphers, and historians—from PhD students to tenured faculty and Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellows. How did I get so lucky that my new colleagues are now lifelong best friends and my most meticulous copyeditors? (I owe you, Carol, Lily, and Crystal!) When I needed it most, the Academy reminded me that the world is full of brilliant artists and scholars who are also deeply compassionate, sometimes silly, and naturally generous people.
I recently realized why, during the past few years of graduate school, I filled my time with mentoring, teaching, and committee work: I was craving the collaborative spirit that was missing in the solitary thinking that dissertation writing demands. My cohort of Rome Prize Fellows reminded me that art history can and should be a collaborative and interdisciplinary field, one strengthened through diverse perspectives, politics, and specialties.
At AAR, I benefitted much from the Works in Progress roundtables that Caroline Goodson spearheaded. It was refreshing to receive honest and critical feedback on publications and dissertation chapters in a format where hierarchies and power dynamics between dissertators and professors dissolved. Our artists and my fellow “paper person” Katherine Beaty inspired me to revive my own printmaking practice, which I had neglected while working on my dissertation. Bringing my knowledge of relief and intaglio techniques back into the fold has introduced another dimension to my study of Mexican manuscripts and the art of copying in colonial Latin America.
Many of the most important conversations about the arts and humanities happened over long Saturday morning runs with the unofficial AAR run club I accidentally started in September while training for the Rome Marathon. Running with colleagues from Doria Pamphilj to the Tiber to Villa Ada was an unexpectedly productive space for intellectual and creative exchange. Followed, always, by a cappuccino!
What is coming up for you in the next few months?
Since leaving the Academy and returning to the United States, I have relocated to Chicago, where I am currently the Anne Jacobson Shutte Fellow in Early Modern Studies at the Newberry Library. During the 2025–26 academic year, I will hold a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City.