David H. Colmenares, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, will deliver an invited lecture titled "Indicios y prefiguraciones: el Códice Vaticano A y el género perdido del anticuarismo sacro novohispano" at UNAM's Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas on April 28, 2026. The lecture reexamines the Codex Vaticanus A, a sixteenth-century pictorial manuscript in the Mesoamerican tradition, as the crystallization of two intersecting processes: the pictographic assimilation of Christian sacred images within indigenous visual traditions, and the transformation of images into historical evidence under an emerging antiquarian sensibility. Drawing on overlooked testimonies by Dominican friars in sixteenth-century Oaxaca —including fray Gregorio García's rare Predicación del evangelio en el Nuevo Mundo (1625) — Professor Colmenares reconstructs a lost genre of sacred antiquarianism and argues that the famous cosmological sections of the codex are best understood as speculative pictographies born of indigenous-Dominican co-creation.
