GRI
Illustrations and texts from the Florentine Codex portray the lives of the native peoples of Mexico before the arrival of the EuropeansGRIIn October, the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in the USA published an online version of the General History of the Things of New Spain collection, better known as the Florentine Codex. The digital version of the 12 books, with 2,500 pages and almost 2,500 hand-drawn illustrations, is available at https://florentinecodex.getty.edu. The books were written in Nahuatl (also called the Aztec language, with 1.5 million living speakers) and Spanish by Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590), with the help of native elders and artists. Completed in 1577 at the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco, now Mexico City, they were sent to Rome, eventually coming to be owned by the Medici family. They were stored in the Laurentian Medici Library in Florence, Italy—hence the name Florentine Codex. The online edition contains transcriptions in both Nahuatl and Spanish, as well as translations in English and Spanish and a text and image search engine. Considered the most reliable source of information about the Mexica (one of the Indigenous groups that ruled the Aztec Empire) and the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish (1518–1521), the collection was incorporated into the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Memory of the World Register in 2015 (AtlasObscura, November 8).
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