The Search for the Codex Cardona by Arnold J. Bauer (review)

BOOK REVIEWS THE SEARCH FOR THE CODEX CARDONA. By Arnold J. Bauer. Durham: Duke UP, 2009, pp. 208, 8 color illustrations, $21.95. In this book, Bauer narrates his two-decades-long-search for the Codex Cardona that first surfaced in 1982 and has now disappeared. According to Bauer and the other scholars who have seen it, the codex describes in great detail pre-Hispanic Mexico and the first stage of the colonial period with more than 300 illustrations accompanied by a sixteenth-century alphabetic text. The illustrations in particular stunned the scholars with their vivid and detailed description of Aztec daily life, agriculture, religion , birds, plants, women’s dress, and colonial practices such as land and labor distribution, tax collection, and church construction. Furthermore, the Codex Cardona contains two extraordinary maps that describe MexicoTenochtitlan and neighboring cities such as Tlatelolco and Culhuacan. These maps may be the most detailed and informative from among all known surviving maps of these areas. Bauer asserts that the Codex Cardona provides more ethnographic information than any of the other colonial codices such as the Codex Mendoza and the Codex Telleriano-Remensis (17). However, the unknown provenance, the elusive and secretive ownership, and the material from which the codex was made have led some leading scholars of Aztec studies to question its authenticity. Bauer addresses these concerns about the Codex Cardona through a combination of scholarly research and creative imagination. Bauer’s story begins in 1985 when Stanford University asked the Croker Laboratory at the University of California, Davis to verify the authenticity of the Codex Cardona, which had been offered for sale. In the end, the deal did not go through, and the codex was returned to the owner. Bauer was deeply impressed by the codex, but he did not begin his research on this document until 2004. During his research, Bauer learned that the Codex Cardona had first appeared at Sotheby’s London in 1982, then at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 1985, and at Christie’s in New York in 1998. None of the negotiations were successful, and the codex subsequently disappeared from the public eye. According to Bauer, all of these institutions felt that the document’s murky provenance and the secretive nature of the owner raised too many doubts about its authenticity. The owner never wished to reveal his identity, and the details about how he came to own the document were lacking in detail or not credible. Furthermore, several leading scholars who examined the codex warned of the possibility that it was a forgery. Gordon Brotherston, H. B. Nicholson, and Stephen Colston all argued that if the codex were an authentic product of the sixteenth century , then it probably wouldn’t be made from indigenous paper (“amatl”) but rather European paper like other contemporary codices such as the C  2010 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 125 The Latin Americanist, June 2010 Codex Mendoza and the Codex Telleriano-Remensis. Despite these objections, Bauer and other specialists seem to believe that the Codex Cardona was a sixteenth-century product. Anthony Pagden, for example, enthusiastically endorsed the authenticity of the codex for Sotheby, and in her evaluation for Christie’s, Stephanie Wood, although reserving definitive judgment, emphasizes the evidence in favor of authenticity. After its final public appearance at Christie’s in 1998, Bauer traces the Codex Cardona to owners in Mexico, who claim to have lost the document. Bauer concludes that the codex may no longer exist in its original form, because the current owner, who is aware of the problems posed by its ambiguous provenance, the legally dubious claims of ownership, and the risk of illegal trafficking in cultural patrimony might have decided to sell the codex piece by piece (169-170). The Search for the Codex Cardona is an imaginative literary text as well. In his search for the codex, Bauer frequently inserts fictional episodes informed by his research. Considering the possibility that the codex was a forgery, Bauer creates a short story in which the famous anthropologist Robert Barlow fabricates the codex. Searching for the owner of the codex, Bauer imagines a Spanish hotelero whose quixotic perspective makes him indifferent...