The selection of plates that forms the core of Invasion and Transformation offers the reader a chance to enter a virtual art museum illustrating the conquest of Mexico. The greatest merit of this book lies in the combination of illustrations of seventeenth-century art and artifacts of the Americas from the Jay I. Kislak Collection at the Library of Congress with the contributions of a substantial group of scholars. Given the weight of the illustrative element in this study, the structure of Invasion and Transformation can be analyzed in pictorial terms. Divided into three parts (plus a final coda about the Kislak paintings), the basic argument resembles a triptych. The main participants of the conquest are placed in the foreground. The four articles grouped in part 1 reflect on the historically accepted values attributed to Moteuczoma, Cortés, and Malinche. On one extreme stands Moteuczoma, the fearful and passive Aztec leader who...

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