I REALLY REALLY like codex style art, it reminds me of modern animation motifs developed in the late 20th century, or modern video game art. I think the aztecs were super ahead of their time with this stuff, and I sometimes fantasize of what aztecs would do with modern animation technology or even flip-books. It was in their murals and they would make amazing turquoise mosaics with the codex style figures. I wish so badly we had a continuous tradition of that all the way up to the present.

There's so much cool stuff the mesoamericans do with pictorial art. When you look at something seemingly banal like a tax record or a census or a lands map, the tlacuillo scribe does all these mezmerizing motifs and little quirks in the drawings where everything they touch is a work of art with its own charm and personality. These motifs are ancient, the trail of footprints thing on maps goes back to teotihuacan and before. The curled angles and codex-style thing goes back to the beginning.

I also like how in mesoamerica the natural rulers and peoples had these epic sagas tracing there history back to some mythical event, like how the codex selden starts 800 years in the past when the original ruler spawned at the local mountain where the kingdom was, and then traces the history all the way up to the present into the colonial era in this crazy complex tapestry of events and locations, the conquest of the region isn't touched upon in the codex selden. You just don't get that kind of thing with most old-world royalty or whatever, at least not in europe.