About

Daniela Bleichmar is a Professor of Art History and History at the University of Southern California. She is the founding director of the Levan Institute for the Humanities and the director of the USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities. Her research and teaching focus on the histories of art, visual and material culture, and science in colonial Latin America and early modern Europe. She specializes in the histories of knowledge production, cultural contact and exchange, museums, collecting and display, as well as books and prints. Bleichmar grew up in Argentina and Mexico before immigrating to the United States. She completed her undergraduate studies at Harvard University and earned her PhD from Princeton University. Her scholarly work has been recognized with multiple prizes and fellowships, including fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, Getty Foundation, and Getty Research Institute, among others. Her notable publications include the books 'Visual Voyages: Images of Latin America from Columbus to Darwin' and 'Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment,' which explore the intersections of art, science, and natural history in the context of the Spanish Empire and early modern Europe. She is actively involved in curatorial projects and international exhibitions, and her current book project examines the transcultural history of the Codex Mendoza, an early colonial Mexican manuscript.

Research topics

• Art
• History
• Computer Science
• Visual arts
• Sociology
• Art history
• Artificial Intelligence
• Archaeology
• Aesthetics
• Geography
• Medicine
• Epistemology
• Anthropology
• Psychology
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• The Codex Mendoza: new insights

  2022-01-01

  book

  Conceived as a contribution to the continuous construction of the identity of the Codex Mendoza, the present volume is organized around three axes: material analysis, textual and stylistic interpretation, and reception and circulation studies. The works of Barker-Benfield and MOLAB further our objective of understanding the manuscript's materiality. The re-binding and conservation process registered by Barker-Benfield has allowed us to do away with speculation regarding the method of production used to create the manuscript and its previous bindings. This, in turn, has allowed heretofore accepted connections, such as the authorship of Francisco Gualpuyogualcal, to be reexamined. Similarly, the analysis undertaken by the MOLAB team and headed by Davide Domenici has settled the debate on the nature of the pigments used in the production of the manuscript. This has added additional layers of nuance to previously held interpretative hypotheses on the meaning of specific pigments and the strictness of their application in the tlacuilolli. While color holds meaning for the tlacuilo, color is not inexorably linked to its materiality. These observations have the potential to inspire a new generation of interpretative studies, based on ever more accurate data regarding the material nature of the Codex Mendoza. Interpretative studies of the manuscript in this volume represent a line of inquiry that, by considering the manuscript from the complex perspectives of the work of art, literature, and bibliography, complement previous anthropological and historical readings of the Codex Mendoza. My essays as well as those by Diana Magaloni and Daniela Bleichmar reconsider the number and style of the artists who produced the manuscript in order to understand both the process by which it was created as well as the place it occupies in the artistic context of the early viceroyalty. Far from entering a binary relation between subjugator and subjugated, the decisions made by these artists and intellectuals manifest the forms of thinking and seeing time and space in the Mesoamerican world. I demonstrate that the pictures in the Codex Mendoza were painted in a workshop in which one, two, or more individuals collaborated on each page to create a single composition; as such, the creation of these pictures took on an air of rituality and functioned as "an instrument to recreate, reactualize, and make coherent the historical becoming linked to territory with cosmic patterns" (Magaloni, this volume). This last observation complements and reinforces Joanne Harwood's proposed reading of the third section of the manuscript. For Harwood, notwithstanding the originality of the visual solutions used to compose this section of the manuscript, the Codex Mendoza's pre-Columbian model resonates with a Mesoamerican religious genre: the teoamoxtli.

  PublisherDOI

• El Códice mendocino: nuevas perspectivas

  2022-01-01

  book

  El proyecto presenta un nuevo volumen de ensayos académicos que la USFQ Press, en conjunto con la Biblioteca Bodleiana de Oxford, publicarán en el presente año. Este esfuerzo es liderado por el editor y también autor Jorge Gómez Tejada, doctor en Historia del Arte (Universidad de Yale). La obra sobre el Mendocino se enfoca en este importante manuscrito de la historia mexicana desde la perspectiva de su materialidad, narrativa escrita y pictórica, interpretación, circulación y recepción; a través de catorce capítulos de autoría de varios de los académicos más importantes del campo. Asimismo, se trata del proyecto editorial sobre el Códice mendocino más internacional que se haya llevado a cabo hasta la fecha. Por un lado, es la primera vez que se publicará simultáneamente un volumen sobre el Mendocino en español e inglés; mientras que, por otro lado, la obra reúne los textos de diferentes catedráticos y especialistas de Europa, Estados Unidos, México, Colombia y Ecuador. La presente obra está estructurada en torno a tres ejes divididos en 14 capítulos: el análisis material, la interpretación textual y estilística y, por último, la recepción y la transmisión del manuscrito. Los estudios del equipo de Davide Domenici (MOLAB) y de B. C. Barker-Benfield comprenden los estudios meticulosos sobre la materialidad del Mendocino. El estudio exhaustivo de los pigmentos y la cromática utilizada protagonizan el capítulo 2; mientras que, el proceso de conservación y reencuadernación son examinados a través de impresionantes radiografías en el capítulo 3. En cambio, los estudios interpretativos del códice comprenden perspectivas complejas artísticas, bibliográficas y literarias, las cuales, en conjunto, complementan las lecturas antropológicas e históricas que se han realizado sobre este texto. De esta forma, los capítulos de Diana Magaloni, Daniela Bleichmar y Jorge Gómez Tejada reconsideran el número y el estilo de los artistas e intelectuales que compusieron el texto; para así, repasar y valorar los procesos creativos en su contextos. De ahí que, los capítulos 4, 5 y 10 presentan la cosmovisión del espacio y el tiempo en el mundo mesoamericano; cuyos contrastes resuenan en el capítulo de Joanne Harwood. El ensayo de Mary Miller refleja la transición que surge a propósito de la contraposición de modelo prehispánicos y recursos importados que inciden en el vocabulario artístico expandido del virreinato temprano de la sociedad mexicana. De hecho, el repaso de ciertos folios comprende los cambios que señalan la llegada del nuevo mundo; así, el individuo deja de ser visto como parte de un orden jerárquico, para luego ser homogenizado por el término “indio”. Por su parte, los textos de Barbara E. Mundy y Claudia Brittenham resaltan elementos más profundos sobre la construcción del Mendocino. En sí, el capítulo 9 abarca reflexiones sobre la naturaleza del códice y discute el tol de los descendientes de la dinastía reinante; mientras que, el capítulo 7, Brittenham explora la dimensión retórica de la representación del tributo dentro de un contexto performativo que trasciende la binaridad prehispánico-colonial. Frances E. Berdan complementa esta visión en el capítulo 8, cuya sensibilidad muestra otra lectura sobre el Mendocino. Si bien, la escritura glífica trata temas políticos, en su entretejido pictográfico la autora muestra al lector relaciones culturales y políticas del mundo prehispánico mexica-huasteca-mixteca. Los textos de Todd P. Olson, Carmen Fernández Salvador y Lucien Sun complementan la visión histórica y la recepción del texto.

  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 8 Training the Naturalist’s Eye in the Eighteenth Century: Perfect Global Visions and Local Blind Spots

  Berghahn Books · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science
  • Sociology
  PublisherDOI

• 7 The Production of Imprecision: Reframing Non-European Objects in Early Modern European Collections

  University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2022-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The cabinet and the world: non-European objects in early modern European collections

  Journal of the History of Collections · 2020 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Geography
  • Art

  Abstract Early modern European collectors proclaimed that their cabinets contained ‘the world’. What do collections from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveal about the ways in which those who assembled, owned and visited them understood objects from other regions and cultures? Inventories, catalogues and descriptions of European collections from the period reveal that the reception of non-European objects was characterized, above all, by practices of geographical and cultural indeterminacy, most notably: (1) empty attribution, (2) misattribution, (3) unstable attribution, and (4) lack of attribution. When considered as early versions of museums of ‘world cultures’, cabinets functioned not as sites for the production of knowledge but as sites of worldmaking, which absorbed, recontextualized and repurposed objects with specific geographical and cultural origins and meanings to create undifferentiated, fungible foreignness.

  PublisherDOI

• CHAPTER 2. Painting as Exploration: Visualizing Nature in Eighteenth-Century Colonial Science

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art history
  • Art
  • Visual arts
  PublisherDOI

• Visual History: The Past in Pictures

  Representations · 2019-01-01 · 36 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This essay defines the category of “visual history” and introduces its operations across the essays included in this special issue. It proposes that such narratives accelerated time in cultures where it became increasingly common to traverse spatial distances. In this way, visual histories are not simply guides to the times, but guides to time itself.

  PublisherDOI

• Painting the Aztec Past in Early Colonial Mexico: Translation and Knowledge Production in the <i>Codex Mendoza</i>

  Renaissance Quarterly · 2019-12-01 · 18 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The “Codex Mendoza” is one of the earliest, most detailed, and most important postconquest accounts of pre-Hispanic Aztec life. Nahuas and Spaniards manufactured the codex through a complex process that involved translations across media, languages, and cultural framings. Translations made Aztec culture legible and acceptable to nonnative viewers and readers by recasting indigenous practices, knowledge, ontology, and epistemology. Following a stratigraphic approach that examines the process through which natives and Spaniards created a transcultural manuscript, the article examines the multiple interpretations and negotiations involved in producing images, books, and information about the indigenous world in early colonial Mexico.

  PublisherDOI

• Botanical conquistadors

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2018-11-22 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence

  Colonial Latin American Review · 2018-01-02 · 9 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence is a revelatory study of the multiple ways in which three powerful members of the Medici family engaged with the New World through the images and objects t...

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Peter Mancall

  University of Pennsylvania

  5 shared

• Todd P. Olson

  2 shared

• Jorge Gómez Tejada

  2 shared

• B. C. Barker-Benfield

  2 shared

• Mary Ellen Miller

  2 shared

• Barbara E. Mundy

  2 shared

• Lucien Sun

  2 shared

• Claudia Brittenham

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship (2004–2006)
• Getty Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship (2008–2009)
• Getty Research Institute fellowship (2013–2014)
• ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship (2018–2019)
• Smithsonian Magazine '37 under 36. America’s Young Innovator…