This innovative study focuses on three sets of paradigmatic images created in New Spain between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—feather mosaics, geographical maps, and graffiti—to propose that the singularity of these creations arises not from a syncretic impulse, but rather from a complex process of “untranslatability.” Foregrounding the distances and differences between incomparable theories and practices of images, Russo demonstrates how the constant effort to understand, translate, adapt, decode, transform, actualize, and condense Mesoamerican and European aesthetics, traditions, knowledge, techniques, and concepts constituted an exceptional engine of unprecedented visual and verbal creativity in the early modern transatlantic world.