Book and manuscript shows usually frustrate everyone. Book lovers want the displayed volumes out from behind the glass and in their hands, where they can turn the pages and smell the dust. Art lovers find texts, especially those in dead languages, a yawn. For other, more casual viewers–those who may glance at book display cases while walking in the quiet, ill-lit corridors of libraries–such shows literally hold only passing interest. But with “America in 1492,” the Newberry Library does the impossible: breaking with this unhappy tradition, it has launched what deserves to be a blockbuster rare-books show.
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Subtitled “American Civilization on the Eve of the Columbus Voyages,” the exhibition surveys some of the 2,000 individual societies that inhabited the New World in 1492. It combines native artifacts with a few native and many Western books and manuscripts to make up perhaps the most beautiful rare-books exhibit ever mounted in Chicago. The curators have staged the works as a kind of archival diorama, placing books and fragments among wall-sized reproductions of manuscript pages. Scholars have long dissected Western narratives to examine the philosophic and cultural prejudices of early diarists and chroniclers. “America in 1492” provides a fascinating visual perspective on the early artists who witnessed and recorded native culture. Depictions range from 16th-century European prints to studies by 19th-century American artists who mimicked native styles. Since this show also offers genuine Native American manuscripts and artifacts, one can measure just how clear or clouded the artists’ views were.
The most extraordinary and visually complex piece in the exhibition is a reproduction of the Codex Mendoza. An enormous scroll containing many drawings, it shows Aztec life in every detail–this may be as close to Aztec home movies as we’re likely to get. Men, women, and children are drawn as they appeared to the artists. A journey from youth to manhood traces a boy’s life from stage to stage with dotted lines. The drawings show a well-developed, cartoonlike visual vocabulary quite different from that of the Aztec monuments: the Codex is an exceedingly rare example of this vibrant style. Most native societies left no written records. Those who did, like the Central Americans, lost them to European bonfires. Native artistry was then put to work for the Christian church. Ironically, the Newberry’s Codex Mendoza is a reproduction commissioned in the mid 19th century by an English nobleman, who regarded the original as “scientific proof” that the Americas were home to the lost tribes of Israel.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Eric Futran.
