Читать книгу The Codex Mendoza: new insights онлайн

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Codex Mendoza embodies an overwhelming tragedy: the dissolution of a civilization. Yet, it also crystallizes and almost celebrates the culture of that civilization by recording and interpreting not only its history, geography (through tax returns), and everyday life, but also its art, language, and pictographic writing. All this is keyed as if to facilitate wider understanding in a European language.

Even before it was gifted to the Bodleian Library by John Selden’s executors around 1659, the manuscript’s intellectual content had been available for wider study through a set of woodcut images in the third volume of Purchas his Pilgrimes (Purchas 1625). Codex Mendoza took pride of place in 1831 as the first item to be fully printed in color in the first volume of the Antiquities of Mexico, reproduced by Lord Kingsborough in lithographic facsimile. That publication, like successive photographic facsimiles of the twentieth century, proved to be too costly for wider circulation. However, in just the last few years, digital technology has enabled the reproduction of the pages of the Codex Mendoza online as well as closer study of its colors through non-destructive instrumental analysis and multispectral photography.