The Search for the Codex Cardona

Author: Bauer, Arnold
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822345961
eISBN Pdf: 9780822391579
Place of publication: Durham , United States
Year of digital publication: 2009
Month: December
Pages: 196
DDC: 972/.01
Language: English

Caption

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.

Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter One - The Crocker Lab
Chapter Two - A World of Painted Books
Chapter Three - Early Doubts
Chapter Four - Sotheby’s of London
Chapter Five - The Getty
Chapter Six - Sloan Ranger
Chapter Seven - Nights in the Gardens of Coyoacán
Chapter Eight - A Mysterious Affidavit
Chapter Nine - Seville
Chapter Ten - Christie’s of New York
Chapter Eleven - El Palacio del Marqués
Chapter Twelve - Librería Zócalo
Chapter Thirteen - An Internet Posting
Chapter Fourteen - The Architect’s Studio
Chapter Fifteen - Pasaje de las Flores
Chapter Sixteen - The High End
Chapter Seventeen - Ibiza
Chapter Eighteen - A Madrid Anticuario
Chapter Nineteen - Resolution
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Subjects

Back

Viewers online

Text
Audio

Download options

Adobe DRM
Loan duration: 21 days
Format: PDF

Existing customer

Email

Password

NEW USER

The Search for the Codex Cardona

Subjects

Viewers online

Download options