The Ragguaglio dell’Idolatria del Mondo nuovo. Transcription and Discussion of a Sixteenth-century Copy of Codex Vaticanus A

Introduction

The Ragguaglio dell’Idolatria del Mondo nuovo is a sixteenth-century manuscript, now preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, the complete transcription of which is published here for the first time. The Venetian manuscript is a copy of the text – but not of the images – of another famous manuscript in the Vatican Library (BAV, Vat. lat. 3738), variously known as Codex Vaticanus A or Codex Ríos, which is dedicated to illustrating and describing the religion, history, and culture of various indigenous Mesoamerican peoples. Although the Ragguaglio is only a copy of the text of Codex Vaticanus A, it is nevertheless an important historical testimony that sheds light on several aspects of the reception of Codex Vaticanus A in late sixteenth-century Italy.

Physical description of the manuscript

The manuscript (BNM, It. Z. 46 = 4748) is a paper codex, in 4°, measuring approximately 15,5 x 21,5 cm, consisting of 71 folios (with folios 62-71 erroneously numbered 64-73). It is bound in a typical eighteenth-century Marciana binding, with the title idola | tria on the spine. The inside of the front cover bears three different labels: a Marciana ex libris dated 1900, another that reads Codex XLVI S.a RR.I. and, in the upper left corner, another Marciana label that identifies the manuscript as mss. italiani. Fondo antico n. 46, provenienza Jac. Contarini 1713, collocazione 4748.

A printed sheet of paper glued to the recto of the first blank folio reads codice xlvi Cont. | in 4. cartaceo, di fogli 73. | del secolo XVI. | ragguaglio dell’Idolatria del Mondo Nuovo, copiato dalla | Biblioteca Vaticana. Incomincia | Home ioca. | Questo vuol tanto dire, come il luogo, dov’è il creatore. | Trattasi principalmente della Religione de’ Messicani. On the verso of the first blank and unnumbered folio, a small handwritten label reads 106. Raguaglio del | Idolatria | del mondo, while on folio 4r the full title is written with an elegant sixteenth-century handwriting: Ragguaglio dell’Idolatria | Del Mondo nuovo | Copiato dalla Bibliotheca Vaticana.

The text of the manuscript begins on folio 5r and at the bottom of folio 5v there is another Marciana ex libris, dated 1722 and bearing the name of the librarian Girolamo Venier. The text continues up to the folio numbered as 67r (actually 65r), while the folios numbered as 67v-73v (65v-71v) are blank. A remarkable aspect of the text is that the glosses which in Codex Vaticanus A are located near and around the images they explain, maintain a similar position in the Ragguaglio, as if commenting on a blank space. The dimensions of these blank spaces, however, clearly indicate that they were not intended to be later filled with painted images (see below).

A sequence of copies: the codices Telleriano-Remensis,
Vaticanus A, and the Ragguaglio dell’Idolatria
del Mondo nuovo

The Ragguaglio strictly follows the structure of Codex Vaticanus A, which itself is a “clean copy” of another manuscript, Codex Telleriano-Remensis, now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The latter, painted by various indigenous artists, bears the glosses of various Spanish authors, probably all of them Dominican missionaries active between Mexico City and Puebla. It must have been completed around 1562 or 1563 (Quiñones Keber 1987; 1995). Subsequently, a large-format clean copy – that is, Codex Vaticanus A – was painted by various painters (some of them clearly indigenous), employing a local palette (Buti and Domenici in press). Two sections absent in Codex Telleriano-Remensis (“Cosmology”, and “Rites and Customs”) were added, and most of the new manuscript was glossed in Italian by two different hands. The large format and the Italian language make it clear that it was intended to be brought to Italy, perhaps as a gift to the Pope or to some other important person in the Vatican. In fact, the Codex Vaticanus A was first recorded in 1596 in the Rainaldi inventory of the Vatican Library, where it must have arrived before 1572 (death of Cardinal Marco Antonio da Mula, librarian who had some pages copied; see note 2). As we will discuss in detail below, it is possible that it was brought by the Dominican missionary Juan de Córdova around 1564 (Domenici 2016; 2018; in press), and the Ragguaglio is a key piece of evidence for this hypothesis.

The Codex Vaticanus A – and therefore the Ragguaglio – is divided into five different sections, commonly known as “Cosmology”, “Thirteen-day periods (trecenas)”, “Monthly religious festivals (veintenas)”, “Rites and customs”, and “Annals”. The wealth of the information, the importance of the “cultural translation” provided by the Italian glosses, as well as the impact of a manuscript that was partially copied and published by Lorenzo Pignoria in the 1615 and 1626 editions of Vincenzo Cartari’s Le imagini degli dei degli antichi (Seznec 1931; Mason 1997; Botta 2020), make that Codex Vaticanus A is a key source for Mesoamerican studies and, as such, it has been the subject of a rich scholarly literature-1.

The date of creation of the Ragguaglio in the Vatican Library is unknown, but below we argue that it was probably written between 1564 and 1568, most likely in 1564. Soon after its creation it must have been transferred to Venice. In fact, the inventory drawn up after the death of Giacomo Contarini indicates that the Ragguaglio passed into the possession of the Venetian aristocrat at some unknown time before 1595 (Ambrosini 1982, 36). It is unlikely that Contarini had a specific interest in American things but he was a collector of objects, books, and manuscripts, as evidenced by what Francesco Sansovino wrote about his

notable and very costly Studio, in which there are very rare books, both printed and handwritten, with an infinite number of drawings, mathematical instruments, and other things made by the hands of men who excelled very much in painting, sculpture and architecture (Sansovino 1581, 138)-1.

Contarini himself bequeathed his library and collections to the Serenissima, but the actual transfer took place only after the death of his last male descendant on December 28, 1713. The books and manuscripts were first inventoried by Marcantonio Maderò in 1714 – at the request of the librarian Girolamo Venier, whose 1722 ex libris is glued to fol. 5v – and transferred to the Marciana (Hochmann 1987; Zorzi 1987), where the Ragguaglio was essentially forgotten until the brief but important mentions by Federica Ambrosini (1982, 17-18, 36). It was only in 2018 that Domenici, guided by Ambrosini’s publication, realized its importance for the history of Codex Vaticanus A and its Italian reception (Domenici 2018; 2021; in press).

The importance of the Ragguaglio dell’Idolatria del Mondo nuovo for the study of the Codex Vaticanus A and its Italian reception

Although it is a copy of Codex Vaticanus A, the Ragguaglio is an important historical testimony that can shed light on several aspects of the history of the Vatican manuscript.

A first, important aspect to note is that the Ragguaglio provides a “snapshot” of the page sequence of Codex Vaticanus A in the late sixteenth century. This is a relevant issue because Codex Vaticanus A today shows an obviously incorrect sequence, so that reconstructions of its original order have been proposed since the first facsimile edition was published in 1900 (Ehrle 1900; Anders et al. 1996). Since Codex Vaticanus A today has a Morocco leather binding that can be dated between 1846 and 1853, scholars have assumed that the errors in the order of the folios were introduced when the current binding replaced the original black leather one, recorded in the Rainaldi inventory of 1596. However, this hypothesis is contradicted by the Ragguaglio, which shows exactly the same sequence as Codex Vaticanus A has today. Despite the uncertainty about the exact date of the Ragguaglio (see below), it is clear that 1595, the year of the Contarini inventory, is an ante quem terminus for its creation. Since the Rainaldi inventory was recorded between 1596 and 1600, this means that Codex Vaticanus A was already out of sequence when it was bound in black leather. Since we do not know when and where Codex Vaticanus A was first bound, we cannot be sure whether the pagination error occurred in Mexico or in Italy, but we can be sure that it occurred before 1595 and most likely, as we will see below, even before 1564.

More generally, the Ragguaglio testifies to the reception of the ethnographic and linguistic information of Codex Vaticanus A in Venice, a city that played a leading role in the European dissemination of the information about the recently “discovered” Americas (Ambrosini 1982; 2017; Horodowich 2018).

The importance of the Ragguaglio with respect to the Italian, and more specifically Venetian, reception of Codex Vaticanus A is effectively demonstrated by another curious source, entitled Descrittione dell’India occidentale. The latter is a printed, eight-pages anonymous booklet, undated and with no place of publication, which describes in detail the objects brought from southwestern Mexico by an anonymous priest (Domenici 2017). In his original study of this source, Domenici proposed that the Descrittione described the Italian voyage of the Dominican missionary Juan de Córdova, that it may have been published in Venice, and that its author may have been the Spanish author and translator Alfonso de Ulloa, who often wrote about the Iberian exploits in both the East and West Indies (Rumeu de Armas 1973). Among other works, Ulloa translated into Italian the “Relatione di alcune cose della Nuova Spagna, & della gran città di Temestitan Messico; fatta per uno gentil’homo del Signor Fernando Cortese”, published in the third volume of G.B. Ramusio, Navigationi et Viaggi (Venice 1556), and the Historie del S.D. Fernando Colombo (Venice 1571). Ulloa’s authorship of the Descrittione is suggested by the fact that the author of the Descrittione uses formulas that indicate that he was a native Spanish speaker, as well as by some strong lexical similarities between Ulloa’s works and the Descrittione. Moreover, the editorial form of the latter, a cheap and expeditious publication similar to the so-called avvisi a stampa, aimed at quickly spreading the news of some event (Ettinghausen 2015), fits well with Ulloa’s “innate sense of news and current events” (Rumeu de Armas 1973, 106), which led this “chronicler of particular events” (95) to publish works that have been described as “analogous to modern journalism” (Solís de los Santos 2013, 597).

The possible time frame for Juan de Córdova’s trip to Italy and the publication of the Descrittione would have been between 1564 and 1577, the latter being the year in which Ulisse Aldrovandi recorded some information from the Descrittione in a manuscript written during a trip to Rome (Domenici 2023; 2024). Moreover, if Ulloa was its author, the later terminus would be reduced to June 16, 1570 (Ulloa’s death) or even to January 14, 1568 (Ulloa’s imprisonment in Venice) (Rumeu de Armas 1973, 61-81). However, the most probable date for Córdova’s trip to Italy would be 1564, when the General Chapter of the Dominican Order was held in Bologna. For this reason, Domenici proposed that Juan de Córdova arrived in Italy in 1564 bringing with him the various artifacts mentioned in the Descrittione and Codex Vaticanus A (Domenici 2017; 2021). That Córdova may also have brought the codex is suggested by the fact that its section “Ritos y costumbres” contains various ethnographic data that are also (and often only) found in Córdova’s works on the Zapotec language (Domenici 2021; in press). Soon after, probably in the very same year of 1564, the Descrittione was published to spread the news of the recent events.

The link between the Descrittione and the Codex Vaticanus A is also attested by a curious detail concerning a rather marginal ethnographic information which brings us back to the relevance of the Ragguaglio. In fact, the Descrittione states that the indigenous men of Mexico wore cotton loincloths that were five arms long and one palm wide (“portano gli huomini una certa tela di bombaso, longa cinque braccia, & larga un palmo, con la qual si coprino i luoghi vergognosi”). This is a very rare piece of information, only matched by a similar phrase in Codex Vaticanus A, which states that they wore loincloths one arm long and one palm wide (“di sotto portavan tutti brache le quali è un pano bombacino d’un braccio ò poco più, et molto stretto come d’un palmo, […] et con questo un mastil è coperte le parti vergognose”). In the first publication on the Descrittione, Domenici noticed the striking similarity but could not explain the difference in the length of the loincloth (Domenici 2017, 523). The solution to this problem is now provided by the Ragguaglio, where the same phrase is copied as “di sotto portavan tutti le brache, che è un panno bombacino o poco più et molto stretto come di un palmo”. As can easily be seen, the copyist forgot to copy the words “d’un braccio”. This detail clearly indicates that the Ragguaglio is the “missing link” between the Codex Vaticanus A and the Descrittione, being the direct source of the latter (whose author had to invent the length of the loincloth). The Venetian location of the Ragguaglio also nicely confirms the hypothesis of the Venetian origin of the Descrittione, initially based on purely linguistic and typographical observations (Domenici 2018).

To sum up, we can say that the Ragguaglio was probably written in Rome in 1564, by someone who later gave it to the author of the Descrittione dell’India occidentale (Alfonso de Ulloa?) in Venice. At an unknown, pre-1595 date, it entered the library of Giacomo Contarini. From then on, it followed the fate of Contarini’s library and ended up in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, where it is still kept today.

The copy and the copyist

As stated in the title page itself, the Ragguaglio was copied in the Vatican Library, likely by a copyist that was a native Italian speaker. In fact, he repeats erroneous forms found in Codex Vaticanus A that would have been obvious to a Spanish speaker (such as Pedronal or Pedrenal for Pedernal). He seems to be aware that the text of Codex Vaticanus A had been written in Mexico and that its authors were Spaniards. In fact, at fol. 27r he changed the phrase “in questo paese” into “in quel paese”, as if to make explicit its remoteness, while at fol. 46r he inserted the term “Spagna” in the phrase “facevano questa alli suoi defunti quasi al modo, che fa la nostra Spagna honore alli morti”, as to make explicit the Spanish origin of the author.

The copyist of the Ragguaglio did not know the Nahuatl language, since he often made errors when copying the Nahuatl terms found in Codex Vaticanus A, which in turn are often quite inaccurate transcriptions themselves. This chain of inaccurate and erroneous transcriptions means that the Nahuatl terms in the Ragguaglio are often so far removed from the correct original form that they would be completely unintelligible without the mediation of Codex Vaticanus A. Moreover, the copyist seems to be unaware of Mesoamerican ethnonyms and terms that would have been familiar to a person like Alfonso de Ulloa (or whoever was the author of the Descrittione dell’India occidentale).

The copyist often abbreviated words (e.g., T. for Teotl, C. for Cielo, C. for Cattivo, B. for Buono, I. for Indifferente, etc.), omitted recurring abbreviations (e.g., q.d. for quasi dicat), synthesized long passages, and omitted entire sentences altogether, obviously to speed up the copying process. At times he omits phrases which are more related with European issues than with Mesoamerican cultures, such as the one that in Codex Vaticanus A 48v[47v] speaks about “perverted Lutherans”. That the copyist was working in a hurry is also suggested by the several occasions on which he miscopied common Italian terms, resulting in meaningless phrases (cuore instead of errore, utile instead of vile, lettera instead of livrea, paese instead of mese, rosario instead of rasore, concludersi instead of condolersi, etc.).

As noted above, the copyist tried to arrange the text in spatial order that somehow mirrors that found in Codex Vaticanus A, where alphabetical glosses are placed next to and around painted images. However, the spatial arrangement in the Ragguaglio often does not correspond exactly to the original one, and it is clear that there was never any intention of adding painted images to the folios of the Ragguaglio (fig. 1). In other words, the copyist simply found a way to show which words or phrases were placed next to images in the original, without attempting to reproduce the images, not even with rough sketches. The only exception to this rule is found on fol. 8v, where the copyist traced three rows of small circles where Codex Vaticanus A has two different sets of turquoise circular signs, arranged in three rows, corresponding to years and periods of 400 years. Curiously enough, the copyist did not try to distinguish between the two types of signs, so that the associated explanation of the total of 4.008 years (8 + 5x400 + 5x400) is almost impossible to understand. The fact that the Ragguaglio was never intended to be illustrated is also demonstrated by the lack, at fol. 67r(65r), of the words “che sono li sotto depinti”, a reference to non-glossed paintings in Codex Vaticanus A which were not going to appear in the Ragguaglio.

Another difference from the original concerns the pagination, since the text of the Ragguaglio is consistently well spaced, while some pages of Codex Vaticanus A are full of thickly written text, so that the former takes up more space than the latter. A good example of this is the text of Codex Vaticanus A fol. 7v, which in the Ragguaglio extends over five folios (12r-14r).

The following transcription has been compared with the text of the Codex Vaticanus A, whose folio number appears in square brackets to the side of the Ragguaglio folio number. Similarly, spelling variants of the Nahuatl terms found in the Codex Vaticanus A appear in square brackets. Other interesting variants are noted either in square brackets or in footnotes, while minor variations in spelling, abbreviations, word order, etc. are not noted.

An explanation of the method used below to record the numbering of the folios is necessary because both codices have misnumbering and pagination errors. In our references to the Ragguaglio we always use the folio number as it appears on the manuscript itself, with the correct number in parentheses where the former is incorrect. Similarly, we always put in square brackets the folio numbering as it appears on Codex Vaticanus A, putting in further square brackets the reference to the revised sequence as proposed by Anders et al. (1996) and commonly used by scholars. Thus, a sequence like Nr(Xr) [Nv[Xv]] means: fol. Nr as numbered on the Ragguaglio (which would be Xr if we correct the numbering error), which corresponds to [folio numbered Nv in the Codex Vaticanus A [which corresponds to folio number Xv in the corrected sequence employed by Anders et al. 1996]].

The comparison with the text of Codex Vaticanus A has been made using a new transcription by Andrea M. D’Amato, Matteo Lazzari, and Sergio Botta (D’Amato, Lazzari, Botta in press), whom we thank for kindly providing the yet unpublished transcription.

Transcription

The Ragguaglio dell’Idolatria del Mondo nuovo by Matteo Lazzari, Davide Domenici

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