The Search for the Codex Cardona
eBook - PDF

The Search for the Codex Cardona

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

The Search for the Codex Cardona

About this book

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 TenochtitlĂĄn 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.

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Yes, you can access The Search for the Codex Cardona by Arnold Bauer in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Mexican History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Contents
  2. Preface
  3. Acknowledgments
  4. Chapter One - The Crocker Lab
  5. Chapter Two - A World of Painted Books
  6. Chapter Three - Early Doubts
  7. Chapter Four - Sotheby’s of London
  8. Chapter Five - The Getty
  9. Chapter Six - Sloan Ranger
  10. Chapter Seven - Nights in the Gardens of CoyoacĂĄn
  11. Chapter Eight - A Mysterious Affidavit
  12. Chapter Nine - Seville
  13. Chapter Ten - Christie’s of New York
  14. Chapter Eleven - El Palacio del Marqués
  15. Chapter Twelve - LibrerĂ­a ZĂłcalo
  16. Chapter Thirteen - An Internet Posting
  17. Chapter Fourteen - The Architect’s Studio
  18. Chapter Fifteen - Pasaje de las Flores
  19. Chapter Sixteen - The High End
  20. Chapter Seventeen - Ibiza
  21. Chapter Eighteen - A Madrid Anticuario
  22. Chapter Nineteen - Resolution
  23. Notes
  24. Bibliography
  25. Index