Popocatepetl (FCbk11f232v)
This iconographic example, featuring a sketch of the famous volcano (Popocatepetl) visible from Mexico City, 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 conical, white-capped mountain with smoke curling out of the top in the direction of the viewer’s left. The base of the peak is dotted with what seems to be vegetation. The left side seems to have a lava flow or a river heading downhill, indicative of its being an active volcano. The horizontal land below the volcano is populated with large trees, grasses, and perhaps an agave.
Stephanie Wood
The curling smoke is reminiscent of smoke in hieroglyphs. As our Online Nahuatl Dictionary shows, this mountain was mentioned in Nahuatl annals, referring to excessive smoking, showers of ash, heavy blankets of snow, and romantic stories about Popocatepetl, neighboring Iztaccihuatl, and even the Nevado de Toluca. Popocatl looms over the valley at over 5,300 meters in elevation. The contextualizing image for this Nahua-authored iconographic painting of the mountain includes the neighboring volcano Iztaccihuatl (“White Woman”), which looks like a reclining woman covered in a white blanket. This companion to Popocatepetl is over 5,200 meters in elevation and dormant. These two volcanoes are typically shown together in paintings that have been made across the ages. Here, the whole scene shows European influence over Nahua painting styles with its shading, resulting in three-dimensionality.
Stephanie Wood
Popocatepetl
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
montañas, humear, humo, erupción, erupciones, estallar, volcán, volcanes, ceniza
Popocatepetl, a volcano called “the mountain smokes,” https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/Popocatepetl
La Montaña Humea
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 11: Earthly Things", fol. XXX, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/11/folio/XXX/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.”
