huipilli (FCbk7f21r)
This iconographic example, featuring a Nahua woman’s blouse or tunic (huipilli), 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. There is no gloss. This example shows a seated woman in profile, facing toward the viewer’s right. As the contextualizing image shows, she is facing a seated man. Her hair is in the neaxtlahualli or axtlacuilli hairstyle that was typical of adult women. Her huipil (as the Spanish called it) has large red and white flowers on a white background. The rectangular fabric patch on her chest, at the base of the V-neck, has a four-petaled flower with a small round circle in at the center, which results in a quincunx shape.
Stephanie Wood
The woman seated below this example (visible on the contextualizing image) has a different design on her huipil, even if the color scheme is the same. The patch on the chest of a huipil plays a practical role in reinforcing the V-neck, but it also serves as a canvas for a woman to express designs that have cultural meaning. If painting and hieroglyphic writing (both involving the verb, iculoa) were the same thing in Nahuas’ minds, then women who made textiles were expressing themselves in a way that had an equivalent in the painting of codices. Thus, it is a worthy pursuit to study the designs in textiles to see how women connected to broader cultural meaning and literacy. The design on this particular example compares favorably to many glyphs for tonalli (sun, day), as a few examples reveal below. See also the Florentine Codex, Book 8, folio 30 verso, where three huipiles have what may be sun signs on these patches below the V-neck, and the Códice Vaticano Ríos, folio 61 recto for yet another.
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
quincunce, quincunces
huipil(li), a handmade woman’s blouse or tunic, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/huipilli
icuiloa, to paint or write, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/icuiloa
el huipil
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 7: The Sun, Moon and Stars", fol. 21r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/7/folio/21r/images/452c0d1a-cc... Accessed 22 July 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.”
