xochipalli (FCbk11f217r)
This iconographic example, featuring a flowering plant that provides a dyeing medium (xochipalli), is included in this digital collection for the purpose of making comparisons with related hieroglyphs. The term selected for this example comes from the text near the image in the Digital Florentine Codex. There is no gloss, per se. This example shows a man almost kneeling, shown in profile facing left, but he has his face turned in a ¾ view. His clothing is a white, probably cotton, long-sleeved, belted tunic, showing some European cultural influence. It is shaded for three-dimensionality. He is in the process of gathering flowers from a bush and putting them into a rather small woven box (perhaps a petlacalli or a chiquihuitl). On the same page, another man has a writing or painting implement and a blank sheet of what seems to be paper. Before him is also one of the xochipalli flowers. It is not clear whether he would be painting with the xochipalli color/dye or painting the flower itself.
Stephanie Wood
The showing of the full face also reveals European artistic influence, as this is rare in early drawings and paintings. The keyworders of the Digital Florentine Codex suggest that the flowers may be Cosmos, and if so, the drawing of a bush is unlikely to be correct. The shape of the flower in this drawing is not Cosmos-like, either. These flowers have a tripartite base with lots of small petals, almost a bouquet in each flower. The flowers that appear in hieroglyphs relating to flower harvesting look more like these flowers here than most flowers in this digital collection (see below). Another likely choice is the xiloxochitl.
Stephanie Wood
Xochipalli
xochipalli
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
flor, colores, tinta, tintas, canasta, arbusto, arbustos
xochipal(li), a yellow dyeing medium, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/xochipalli
un medio de teñido hecho de flores, posiblemente produce el color rosa
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 11: Earthly Things", fol. 217r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/11/folio/217r/images/0 Accessed 16 November 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.”
