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A series of historicist studies, inaugurated with the publication of a new facsimile by James Cooper Clark in 1938, sought to ground the history of the codex in documentary and material evidence. In this facsimile, Clark focuses on two main areas: first, the materiality of the manuscript and, second, the identification of a possible author of its texts. For his analysis of the paper used for the Codex Mendoza, Clark (1938) uses the 1909 Briquet Catalogue. The evidence Clark discovered allowed him to safely date the production of the manuscript to the middle of the sixteenth century, thus providing the evidence necessary to historically ground the manuscript. Likewise, his discussion of the pigments used in the Codex Mendoza, which he based on the list of native pigments found in Book XI of Sahagún’s ([1578] 1979) Florentine Codex, constituted the first study that understood the manuscript as a product of the ingenuity of indigenous artists. In his attempt to name an author of the Codex Mendoza, Clark bases his work on the interpretation of a calligraphic gesture with which the author of the manuscript’s texts concludes folio 71v. According to Clark, the aforementioned gesture was the letter “J” and, as a result, Clark attributes the texts in the Codex Mendoza to Martín Jacobita, one of Sahagún’s collaborators in Tlatelolco.