Flickering Creations

The first book to recover the Indigenous aesthetic principles that guided how artists of the Aztec Empire created precious art

For the Nahua people of the Aztec Empire, precious things such as feathers, stones, and gold—known in the Nahuatl language as tlazohtli—were central to their understanding of the material world and their place in it. Flickering Creations reconstructs the Indigenous Nahua genre of precious art, revealing the aesthetic concepts that informed how artists worked with these vibrant, living, and emotionally compelling materials.

In this beautifully illustrated book, Allison Caplan presents new readings of major artworks of the Aztec Empire, drawing on Nahuatl alphabetic and glyphic writings to show how Nahuas of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries possessed their own art theory. She traces how key principles of precious art—tonalli (solar animacy), ixnezcayotl (appearance), *xiptli (skin), and nechihchihualiztli (assemblage)—indelibly shaped surviving masterpieces of feather, turquoise mosaic, and cast gold. Bridging art history, anthropology, linguistics, and literary studies, Caplan demonstrates how the creation and reception of exquisite works of precious art centered on activating and dynamically transforming their relationships to one another, their makers, their audience, and the wider world.

Providing a model for engaging with Indigenous material culture on its own terms, Flickering Creations shows how this previously unrecognized body of theory unveils entirely new dimensions of artistry and meaning in Nahua art.