The Codex Borgia Group is the name scholars give to five surviving pre-conquest pictorial manuscripts, the Codex Borgia, Codex Cospi, Codex Fejervary-Mayer, Codex Laud and Codex Vaticanus B, which share a closely related painting style, format and structure closely enough that they are believed to descend from a common workshop tradition, most likely centered in the Puebla-Tlaxcala region of central Mexico, though the exact ethnic and workshop origin remains debated among Nahua, Mixtec and other possible attributions. They are screenfold books painted in a pictographic system rather than alphabetic writing, organized around the 260 day ritual calendar (the tonalpohualli), presenting the calendar's day signs, associated deities and auguries in elaborate painted sequences. All five survived the conquest by leaving Mexico for Europe, most within decades of contact, which is the direct reason they escaped the mass destruction of indigenous books that took place under colonial rule.
Facts
Origins
Era of Composition Era of CompositionPainted in the pre-conquest or immediate early colonial period, most likely in the fourteenth or fifteenth century CE, though precise dating of pictorial manuscripts of this kind is difficult and remains debated. 1 Attributed Author / CompilerNo named individual authors; each codex was produced by trained scribe-painters (tlacuiloque) working within a shared workshop painting tradition, and the group's precise ethnic and geographic origin within central Mexico remains an open scholarly question. 1 Text
Literary Form Transmission
Manuscript TraditionAll five surviving members of the group left Mexico for Europe within decades of the conquest and are now held in European libraries and museums (Rome, Bologna, Liverpool, London and the Vatican among them); their early departure from Mexico is the direct reason they escaped the mass destruction of indigenous painted books carried out under Spanish colonial rule. 1 Structure
StructurePainted as folding screenfold books (not bound codices in the European sense) organized around the 260 day tonalpohualli ritual calendar, presenting day signs, their governing deities and augural associations in extended pictorial sequences rather than in alphabetic prose. 1 Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteGrouped by art historians with several related pre-Columbian screenfold manuscripts sharing common ritual-calendrical content and pictorial style, read collectively as a coherent divinatory corpus rather than as isolated, unrelated documents. 1Tradition: Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate Learn More
Five Books That May Share One Workshop
This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Five painted screenfold books, held today in libraries and museums scattered across Europe, are grouped together by scholars not because any surviving record says they belong together, but because their painting style, their format and the way they organize the 260 day ritual calendar resemble each other closely enough that art historians believe they must share a common workshop origin somewhere in central Mexico. No one has settled exactly where that workshop was, or which people, Nahua speakers, Mixtec painters, or some other group entirely, produced it, and Elizabeth Hill Boone's study is careful to treat that uncertainty as a live scholarly question rather than a solved one.
What is not in question is how the five books survived at all. Spanish colonial authorities destroyed indigenous painted books on a large scale, treating the pictorial calendars and their deity imagery as idolatrous, and the overwhelming majority of what existed before contact is lost entirely. The Codex Borgia Group survived specifically because all five volumes left Mexico for Europe within decades of the conquest, carried away as curiosities, gifts or plunder before local destruction could reach them. Their preservation is a story about distance and accident as much as about the value anyone at the time placed on their content.
Reading them today asks something different of a viewer than reading an alphabetic text. There is no sentence to translate, only a dense pictorial vocabulary of day signs, deities and directional associations that a period reader would have known how to navigate and that modern scholarship has spent a century learning to reconstruct, day sign by day sign, image by image.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Sources
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