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 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 palaeography. "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 Christie's auction house in New York. Bauer first saw the "Codex Cardona" in 1985 in the Crocker Nuclear Laboratory at the University of California, Davis, where scholars from Stanford and 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 once again disappeared from public view. Bauer's curiosity about its provenance and whereabouts brought him into contact with an international cast of curators, agents, charlatans, and erudite book dealers, and 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. "The Search for the Codex Cardona" is a mystery that touches on issues of cultural patrimony, the workings of the rare books and manuscript trade, the uncertainty of archives and evidence, and the ephemerality of the past and its remains.