Florentine Codex

Text by Bernardino de Sahagún

The Florentine Codex is a 16th century ethnographic research study in Mesoamerica by the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. Sahagún originally titled it La Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España (in English: The General History of the Things of New Spain). After a translation mistake, it was given the name Historia general de las Cosas de Nueva España. The best preserved manuscript is commonly referred to as the Florentine Codex, as the codex is held in the Laurentian Library of Florence, Italy. In partnership with Nahua elders and authors who were formerly his students at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, Sahagún conducted research, organized evidence, wrote and edited his findings. He worked on this project from 1545 up until his death in 1590. The work consists of 2,500 pages organized into twelve books; more than 2,000 illustrations drawn by native artists provide vivid images of this era. It has been described as "one of the most remarkable accounts of a non Western culture ever composed." Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson were the first to translate the Codex from Nahuatl to English, in a project that took 30 years to complete. In 2012, high resolution scans of all volumes of the Florentine Codex, in Nahuatl and Spanish, with illustrations, were added to the World Digital Library. In 2015, Sahagún's work was inscribed into the Memory of the World register by UNESCO. In 2023, the Getty Research Institute released the Digital Florentine Codex which gives access to the complete manuscript.

In 1575 the Council of the Indies suggested to the Spanish Crown to educate the native Americans in Spanish instead of using the indigenous languages; for this reason, the Spanish authorities required Fray Sahagún to hand over all of his documents about the Aztec culture and the results of his research in order to get further details about this matter. In the meantime, the Bishop of Sigüenza, Diego de Espinosa, who was also the Inquisitor General and President of the Royal Council of Castile instructed the cleric Luis Sánchez to report about the situation of the native Americans. The manuscript became part of the collection of the library in Florence at some point after its creation in the late sixteenth century. It was not until the late eighteenth century that scholars become aware of it, when the bibliographer Angelo Maria Bandini published a description of it in Latin in 1793. The work became more generally known in the nineteenth century, with a description published by P. Fr. Marcellino da Civezza in 1879. The three volume manuscript of the Florentine Codex has been intensely analyzed and compared to earlier drafts found in Madrid. The Tolosa Manuscript (Códice Castellano de Madrid) was known in the 1860s and studied by José Fernando Ramírez. The Tolosa Manuscript has been the source for all published editions in Spanish of the Historia General. The English translation of the complete Nahuatl text of all twelve volumes of the Florentine Codex was a decades long work of Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles Dibble, an important contribution to the scholarship on Mesoamerican ethno history. In 1979, the Mexican government published a full color, three volume facsimile of the Florentine Codex in a limited edition of 2,000, allowing scholars to have easier access to the manuscript. The Archivo General de la Nación (Dra. Alejandra Moreno Toscano, director) supervised the project that was published by the Secretariat of the Interior (Enrique Olivares Santana, Secretary). The 2012 World Digital Library high resolution digital version of the manuscript makes it fully accessible online to all those interested in this source for Mexican and Aztec history. In 2023, the Getty Research Institute released the Digital Florentine Codex which gives access to the complete manuscript and multiple translations.

After the facsimile edition became available generally in 1979, the illustrations of the Florentine Codex could be analyzed in detail. Previously, the images were known mainly through the black and white drawings found in various earlier publications, which were separated from the alphabetic text. The images in the Florentine Codex were created as an integral element of the larger work. Although many of the images show evidence of European influence, a careful analysis by one scholar posits that they were created by "members of the hereditary profession of tlacuilo or native scribe painter". The images were inserted in places in the text left open for them, and in some cases the blank space has not been filled. This strongly suggests that when the manuscripts were sent to Spain, they were as yet unfinished. The images are of two types, what can be called "primary figures" that amplify the meaning of the alphabetic texts, and "ornamentals" that were decorative. The majority of the nearly 2,500 images are "primary figures" (approximately 2000), with the remainder ornamental. The figures were drawn in black outline first, with color added later. It was deduced that twenty two artists worked on the images in the Codex. This was done by analyzing the different ways that forms of body were drawn, such as the eyes, profile, and proportions of the body. It is not clear what artistic sources the scribes drew from, but the library of the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco had European books with illustrations and books of engravings. European elements appear in the imagery, as well as pre Conquest images done in the "native style". A number of the images have Christian elements, which Peterson has described as "Christian editorializing". The entirety of the Codex is characterized by the Nahua belief that the use of color activates the image and causes it to embody the true nature, or ixiptla, of the object or person depicted. For the Aztecs, the true self or identity of a person or object was shown via the external layer, or skin. Imparting color onto an image would change it so that it was given the identity of what it was portraying. Color was also used as a vehicle to impart knowledge that worked in tandem with the image itself.