Museo de America

The Museum of the Americas was created by decree on 19 April 1941, with the stated aim of bringing together publicly owned collections from Spain's former territories and making a place where they could be learned about, admired and studied by researchers and by the general public alike. It is one of Spain's national museums and is attached to the Ministry of Culture.

That founding purpose explains the shape of the collection. It runs across three bodies of material most museums keep apart: pre-Hispanic archaeology, the art of the colonial centuries, and nineteenth and twentieth century ethnography from across the Americas. The permanent exhibition is arranged by theme rather than by culture, and religion has a section of its own within it, which is unusual and is part of why this atlas has reason to look at the museum at all.

The awkwardness of the institution is also its subject. A museum of the Americas assembled in Madrid, out of what Spanish administration and Spanish collectors sent home, is a museum whose holdings and whose own history are the same story told twice, and the arrangement of the galleries cannot avoid saying something about that. The atlas records the museum as a custodian, names what it holds and how the holdings arrived where that is known, and does not treat the fact of custody as an argument either for or against the institution.

For most of its European life the Madrid Codex was two manuscripts with two names. One portion, the Troano, was described in Madrid in 1866 and bought by the Spanish state in 1888. The other, the Cortesianus, was acquired by the Museo Arqueologico Nacional in 1872 from a collector who said it had come from Extremadura. Leon de Rosny recognised in 1880 that the two were halves of a single book. They have been kept together since, and the compound name Tro-Cortesianus preserves the accident.

How the book left Yucatan is not recorded. The claim attached to the Cortesianus half, that a companion of Cortes brought it back to Spain, is a dealer's provenance and not a document, and the atlas states it as such rather than repeating it as history. The Madrid Codex therefore has a well attested modern history and an unrecoverable early one, which is the ordinary condition of the surviving Maya books rather than a peculiarity of this one.

What the split cost is worth naming, because it is the kind of damage only a catalogue can do. For fourteen years the two halves were studied as separate manuscripts. Any reading of an almanac that ran across the join was wrong by construction, and no amount of care by the individual scholars could have corrected it, because the error was in the shelf and not in the argument. Recognising the two as one book was a custodial act before it was a scholarly one.