Lord Kingsborough (1795-1837) and The Antiquities of Mexico (1831-1848)

Libraries and private collections treasured pre- and post- Hispanic documents (Codex) that informed about the history and culture of Mesoamerican civilizations. By the XVIII century, European philology saw in the Mesoamerican codex a resource to probe the idea that pictographic writing was a primitive form that evolved to the alphabetic one.

As some of his contemporaries, Kingsborough was not interested at all in the interpretation of the codex; instead, he was interested in proving with them that Mesoamerican civilizations could be related to the lost tribe of Israel. The fascination for the exotic pushed Kingsborough into a publishing undertaking that left him in debt and, at the end, put him in jail.

The nine volumes gather Mayan, Aztec, and Mixtec codex such as the Mendoza Codex and the Matrícula de Tributos, the Laud Codex, and the Selden Codex, all of them at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, the Dresden Codex, at the Museum of the Saxon State Library of Dresden, Germany, and the Group Borgia Codex, at the Vatican Library. Among other documents reproduced by Aglio, there is the Kingsborough Codex, a reproduction of the post-Hispanic Tepetlaoztoc Codex, which proves the violent treatment of the Spaniard crown messenger to the native population.

Only near twenty pre-Hispanic codices have survived the Spanish destruction, while there are numerous post-Hispanic codices that have been preserved.

Codices were created by highly qualified artists, the “tlacuilos”, who devoted themselves almost completely to the elaboration of the manuscripts.

The Library of Virginia Special Collections' "The Antiquities of México" is complete and in excellent shape. This Google Art & Culture project realized by students from the class LAIS301 Spanish in the Community at the University of Richmond, has as main goal to offer users a first approach in a bilingual format to a corpus of works (the codices) that has already been the subject of extensive specialized academic research.

This is only an initial reading/gaze that results from the first aesthetic encounter with the códices. What do these images invite us to think? What icons do we recognize in the códices? What questions can we grasp after looking at them? In one sense, this project goes beyond recognizing the limits of Kingsborough ambitious enterprise: By making its images/reproductions accessible to the public, we aim to engage in a spontaneous dialogue about the past and the present.