The Capitol Dome

Fig. 3. The frontispiece and title page to the 1522 publication of Cortés's 1520 report (carta de relación) to the Spanish king the Dome may wonder why the scene was included at all. The question is a good one, as its answer has a surprising twist. Adding to the mystery is this fact: while nobody disputes that Montezuma and his imperial entourage met Cortés and the conquistadors on that fall day in 1519, some historians question whether Montezuma actually surrendered. Evi- dence for his capitulation, on that day or at any point between then and his violent death seven months later, is murky and contradictory. Arguably, there was no such surrender. 3 So why is an inaccurate portrayal of a Mexican scene preserved inside the Dome? Why is a lie enshrined in the Capitol? SCeneS of Surrender The depiction of Montezuma's welcome reception as a surrender was a claim first made in print by Cortés himself. He wrote a report to the king of Spain the following summer, after the Spaniards had been forcibly ejected from Montezuma's capital city of Tenochtitlan (today's Mexico City), some two-thirds of the invaders killed in the process. The fortunes of the conquistador company were at a low point, their prospects grim. But Cortés insisted that Montezuma, as the rightful ruler of the Aztec Empire, had accepted the sovereignty of the Spanish king over Mexico at that first meeting, and, more- over, that the subjugated emperor had repeatedly restated his surrender and permitted the Spaniards to detain him for months. This meant that, according to Spanish law, the subsequent battle in the city was a rebellion, permitting the "legal" slaughter and enslavement of tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of indigenous Mexicans during the 1520s. Cortés's report was published as soon as 1522 (fig. 3); it remains the foun- dational account of events, regardless of how blatant its distortions now appear. 4 The invention of Montezuma's surrender went from a convenient lie to a crucial one, repeated for decades by conquistadors and chroniclers, quickly and widely believed, and then restated for centuries as a simple fact of history. The repetition of the supposed fact of Montezuma's surrender was visual as well as textual. Painters and engrav- ers favored three closely related scenes. One was the moment when Montezuma met Cortés for the first time. This scene gave artists an opportunity to depict the human and natural splendor of the occa- sion, complete with the Aztec imperial entourage and the parade of conquis- tadors. The subject was particularly popular in Mexico and Spain in the late seventeenth century, depicted on biom- bos (painted screens adapted in Mexico from Japanese byobu) and in painting series (fig. 4, the original of which can be seen today not far from the Capitol, in the Library of Congress's Kislak Col- lection). Earlier versions tended to favor a rural setting, but an urban one was also common and was typical by the eigh- teenth century (figs. 5, 6). By the nine- teenth century, the great encounter was 3 THE CAPITOL DOME Fig. 2. "Cortes and Montezuma at Mexican Temple," scene #3 in the Frieze of American History ARCHITECT OF THE CAPITOL JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY

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