cuicani (FCbk10f19r)
This painted black-line drawing features a singer, described as a cuicani in the accompanying Nahuatl text and a cantor in the Spanish version. This is not a glyph, but it has glyphic elements, especially the way the book that the singer is holding emits scrolls that intend to help the viewer visualize the sound of singing. These scrolls are not uniformly drawn, but the most complete of the three has a white volute, and just beyond the curl is a small white circle, beyond that is a straight black line, and finally, a black dot. The singer’s mouth is open, too, which suggests he is singing the lyrics and notes that appear in the songbook. He wears European-style clothing; nevertheless, he is likely a Nahua. He holds a song book that has short, straight, black hash marks that are suggestive of lyrics or notes.
Stephanie Wood
It is difficult to determine whether the volutes for song are pre-contact in nature or perhaps reflect something borrowed from the musical notation that was taught in the schools set up by the friars. Another elaborate volute, below, shows how a song scroll could diverge from a speech scroll. Some of the song scrolls, below, are turquoise. Jeanette Peterson (Florentine Codex 2019, 27) discusses the coloring of some other song scrolls that appear in Book 8.
Glyphs and the iconography of books could have many associations, but often they were found in churches and could even be equated with church singers, as a couple of examples below underline.
Stephanie Wood
cuicani
cuicani
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
canción, canciones, cantores, iglesias, libros, libro, psalterio, papel
cuicani, singer, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cuicani
el cantor
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 10: The People", fol. 19r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/10/folio/19r/images/0 Accessed 19 June 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.”
