Speaker: Dr. Patrick Hajovsky, Associate Professor, Art History, Southwestern UniversityTaking a critical perspective, I argue that Aztec “luxury” objects worn or held on the body linked valor and value to tonalli, the heat-life energy that manifests personality and fate, and yollotl, the heart, source of blood and center of human life. The Aztecs explored the equivalences and differences between luxury materials–lapidary, gold, feather–through synesthetic metaphors that tied visual art to Nahuatl poetry. Forms made of these materials further emphasize these essential connections between person and object, which allowed the object to become a surrogate of the owner’s agency. This is important to consider in the Aztec economy of sacrifice and the logic of state of control.