The Florentine Codex Initiative at the Getty Research Institute

The Florentine Codex, an encyclopedic manuscript produced collaboratively by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and a team of indigenous writers and artists, was created in sixteenth-century Mexico City. Renowned for its bilingual presentation of Pre-Hispanic indigenous culture and the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, the codex’s twelve books contain a primary Nahuatl text (an indigenous language of central Mexico), a Spanish interpretation of the Nahuatl text by Sahagún, and thousands of illustrations painted by Nahua artists. Scholars regard the codex, modeled after ancient Roman and medieval encyclopedias, as the most reliable source of information about Mesoamerican culture. After its completion in 1577, the manuscript was sent to Europe and acquired by the Medici by 1587. Today, it is housed in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, Italy. The codex was incorporated into UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2015.

The collaborative Florentine Codex initiative leverages the Getty’s expertise in digital scholarship and vocabulary standards in order to produce 1) the Digital Florentine Codex giving scholars, for the first time, full digital access to the illuminated manuscript and its transcriptions and translations, including via text and image search functionalities; 2) a scholarly digital publication on the codex’s Book 12, which documents the Nahua-Mexica (or Aztec) perspective of the Spanish conquest; and 3) 4,000 trilingual (English, Spanish, Nahuatl) entries to the Getty vocabularies drawn from the codex’s unique linguistic information. The initiative aims to give global access to the manuscript and disseminate knowledge about its cultural significance.