In The Search for the Codex Cardona, Arnold J. Bauer tells the story of his experiences on the trail of a cultural treasure, a Mexican “painted book” that first came into public view at Sotheby’s auction house in London in 1982, nearly four hundred years after it was presumably made by Mexican artists and scribes. On folios of amate paper, the Codex includes two oversized maps and 300 painted illustrations accompanied by text in sixteenth-century paleography. The Codex relates the trajectory of the Nahua people to the founding of the capital of Tenochtitlán and then focuses on the consequences of the Spanish conquest up to the 1550s. If authentic, the Codex Cardona is an invaluable record of early Mexico. Yet there is no clear evidence of its origin, what happened to it after 1560, or even where it is today, after its last known appearance at Christie’s auction house in New York in 1998.
Bauer first saw the Codex Cardona in 1985 in the Crocker Nuclear Laboratory at the University of California, Davis, where scholars from Stanford and the University of California were attempting to establish its authenticity. Allowed to gently lift a few pages of this ancient treasure, Bauer was hooked. By 1986, the Codex had again disappeared from public view. Bauer’s curiosity about the Codex and its whereabouts led him down many forking paths—from California to Seville and Mexico City, to the Firestone Library in Princeton, to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and Christie’s in New York—and it brought him in contact with an international cast of curators, agents, charlatans, and erudite book dealers. The Search for the Codex Cardona is a mystery that touches on issues of cultural patrimony, the workings of the rare books and manuscripts trade, the uncertainty of archives and evidence, and the ephemerality of the past and its remains.
The Search for the Codex Cardona
Arnold J. Bauer
On the trail of a sixteenth-century Mexican treasure
208 pages (November 2009)
8 page color insert
Arnold J. Bauer
On the trail of a sixteenth-century Mexican treasure
208 pages (November 2009)
8 page color insert
Cloth - $74.95 | 0-8223-4596-X |
| [ISBN13 978-0-8223-4596-1] | |
Paperback - $21.95 | 0-8223-4614-1 |
| [ISBN13 978-0-8223-4614-2] | |
“The Search for the Codex Cardona is a terrific read. I could hardly put it down. If the Codex is real, and I came to believe that it probably is authentic, then it is the most important document of the early colonial world to have come to light in more than 100 years.”—Mary Miller, Dean of Yale College and author of The Art of Mesoamerica: From Olmec to Aztec“The Search for the Codex Cardona is, like an Aztec worldview, about a paradox and a pilgrimage through caves, cities, and marketplaces. Is it part of a very energetic ‘hoax’ or a story representing the tragic losses of the indigenous Mexican world, carried, washed, and burned away in the millennial passions of the Spaniards? The author makes us ask, ‘Could it be that there was once such a book of Mexican wonder and cultural creativity telling of the space and time of the Aztecs and their profound encounter with the strangers from across the sea? A book now dismembered into scattered pieces of stories and images, waiting for a new generation to piece the stories back together?’ The real value of the book is that it leaves the reader wondering whether it is an example of a deep human drive to play the trickster with us or whether the Codex is just around the corner in a rare books shop or closet. Reader Beware! Reader Alert!”—Davíd Carrasco, Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America, Harvard University
Arnold J. Bauer is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Davis.
Related subjects:
History, Latin American
Anthropology/Ethnography
Art History & Criticism