This study focuses on mural paintings, sculptures, picture writings and body images from 16th-century Mexico. Julia Kloss-Weber analyses the extent to which many of the images produced during the New Spain mission address alterity, i.e. identity-creating otherness. At the same time, she investigates the form of alterity assigned to images as fields of tension within an "iconic difference" (Gottfried Boehm). This brings together two areas of discourse that had developed largely independently of each other: Reflections on constructions of the "other" in the context of postcolonial studies, and debates on image theory. Thus it emerges that images not only mediate between cultures, but are also themselves the subject of processes of transcultural negotiations.