calli (FCbk8f41r)
This iconographic example features a ruler guarding a neighborhood (tlaxilacalli), representative of the city or town (altepetl). He is surrounded by houses (calli), which are the focus of this example. It is included in this digital collection for the purpose of making potential comparisons with related hieroglyphs. The term selected for this example comes from the keywords chosen by the team behind the Digital Florentine Codex, along with the text, which refers to a wide range of buildings that all end with -calli. This example shows eleven houses or buildings (calli) around a courtyard (ithualli). The houses look as though they are lying on their backsides, with their entrances open to the sky. The classically styled entrances are framed by beams that are painted red. The houses have been drawn and painted as though they are three-dimensional, with one side wall visible, along with their flat roofs. These added facades (not the norm) are shaded in an effort to add to the three-dimensionality, but the light source is not uniform. The entryways appear to be open, and the inside color is similar to the dirt of the courtyard, but darker. The house just below the ruler has a fire (tletl) or flame (tenepilli) inside the entrance. The contextualizing image shows four men sitting by another, bigger fire. The fires would burn in the night while these men sat guard over the town. The ruler (tlatoani, or tlahtoani, with the added glottal stop) sits on his woven throne-like, high-backed seat (tepotzoicpalli, or tepotzohicpall) in the midst of the buildings. He wears his turquoise diadem (xiuhuitzolli, xiuhhuitzolli) and turquoise cloak (tilmatli, tilmahtli) bordered with eyes (tenixyo, tenixyoh). These are very high-status textiles. Even his loincloth (maxtlatl) is turquoise.
Stephanie Wood
The perspectives used in creating this painting of buildings shows some European influence in the three-dimensionality, but the bird’s eye view and the tipping of the buildings onto their backs show that the adoption of perspective is partial. Below is another example of a group of buildings from a bird’s eye view, but it lacks the three-dimensionality. It does have the shifting approach to the various entrances. In the earliest representations of calli, they appear in a profile view, but as European influence increased, frontal views became more common. The example below from the Tierras collection of the Archivo General de la Nación, shows two people sitting out of doors, as in this example.
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
arquitectura, casa, casas, edificio, edificios, perspectivas, tridimensionalidad, vista de pájaro, gobernador, gobernante, gobernadores, gobernante, tilma, trono
cal(li), house or building, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/calli
casa o edificio
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book undefined: Kings and Lords", fol. 41r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/8/folio/41r/images/cda1ddc7-78... Accessed 23 August 2025.
Images of the digitized Florentine Codex are made available under the following Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International). For print-publication quality photos, please contact the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana ([email protected]). The Library of Congress has also published this manuscript, using the images of the World Digital Library copy. “The Library of Congress is unaware of any copyright or other restrictions in the World Digital Library Collection. Absent any such restrictions, these materials are free to use and reuse.”
