About the images
Where the illustrations come from, and why they are not tracings
What it covers
Where every drawing in this project comes from, feature by feature, and why none of them is a tracing of a codex plate.
The full entry is in Spanish, and here is why
What you have read above is this project's own summary of about the images. The full entry — the part that rests on the sixteenth-century sources — has not been translated, and that is a decision rather than an omission.
We chose not to touch the primary text. Those sections quote Sahagún, Durán and the codices in their own words, often in sixteenth-century Castilian. A quotation carried across stops being a quotation: it loses the register, the ambiguity and the exact wording someone might want to check against a facsimile.
In Spanish the entry carries:
- De dónde vienen
- Por qué no son calcos
- Lo que no se sabe
Read the full entry in the original Spanish → Nahuatl names and terms are identical in both versions.
How to cite this page
Alma Mexica, «About the images», The documents. Revised 2026-09-17. https://almamexica.org/en/document/acerca-de-las-imagenes/