Colors Between Two Worlds: The Florentine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagún

Wolf, Gerhard, and Joseph Connors, eds.

ISBN 10: 8889854952 / ISBN 13: 9788889854952

Published by Kunsthistoriches Institut / Harvard University Center, Florence, 2011

About this Item

8vo. 483pp/ Red cloth block in gilt on the spine and upper board. Illustrated throughout in color. Index. A fine copy in a fine dustwrapper. Seventeen approaches to the painters of the New World, with emphasis on the Florentine Codex and Bernardino de Sahagún. .

Seller Inventory # 23464

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Colors Between Two Worlds: The Florentine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagún
• Publisher: Kunsthistoriches Institut / Harvard University Center, Florence
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 8889854952
• ISBN 13: 9788889854952
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First edition.
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Miscellany
  • Rare Books

About this title

Synopsis

For half a century the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590), often described as the first anthropologist of the New World, worked with his indigenous colleagues at the Collegio Imperial at Tlatelolco (now Mexico City) on an encyclopedic compendium of the beliefs, rituals, language, arts, and economy of the vanishing culture of the Aztecs. Colors Between Two Worlds examines the most richly illustrated manuscript of this great ethnographic work, the Florentine Codex, which is in the collection of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, through the issue of color. The Codex reveals how the colors the Aztecs used in their artistic production and in everyday life, as well as the names they gave each color, illuminate their understanding of the world around them, from the weather to the curing of disease. The pigments and dyes that indigenous artists used to illustrate the Codex reflect a larger dialogue between native and European cultures, which the Florentine Codex records more fully than any surviving document from colonial New Spain.