de Gante (Osu8v)

This painting of the head of a friar–in profile and facing toward the viewer’s left–comes from the Codex Osuna, folio 8 verso (or Image 19). We are including it here as an example of iconography, but it could well be considered a simplex glyph. The gloss identifies this man as Fray Pedro de Gante, who was one of the earliest ecclesiastics to work among the Nahuas of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. The friar’s head is shaved on the crown and he wears a dark robe with a cowl neck. The contextualizing image suggests that he was at the church of San José in that city, but the full page of the manuscript shows an additional four barrios, each one also represented by a Christian church (much in the way they once would have had a tepetl or altepetl symbol). Churches were often built on the sites of former temples, and Indigenous laborers were taxed with most of the construction work.