The Search for the Codex Cardona

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 Sothebys 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 Tenochtitlan and then concentrates 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, or what happened to it after 1560, or even where it is today, following its last known appearance, in 1998 at Christies auction house in New York.

Arnold J. Bauer is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Davis.