Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana

The Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, one of the richest and most important libraries in the world, holds numerous texts and documents of interest for Americanist studies. Those that can be attributed, at least in part, to the work of Indigenous artists are three Mesoamerican pictorial manuscripts. Two of these (Vat. lat. 3773, known as the Codex Vaticanus B, and Borg. mess. 1, known as the Codex Borgia) are divinatory or mantic manuscripts from the Nahua cultural sphere; they are among the very few pre-Columbian codices still in existence and are therefore of extraordinary importance for Mesoamerican studies. A third manuscript (Vat. lat. 3738, known as the Codex Vaticanus A) was instead painted around 1562 by a group of artists—some of them in all likelihood Indigenous—probably active in the Dominican convent of Puebla (Mexico). It is one of the most renowned colonial sources on Indigenous Mesoamerica, since it contains texts and images describing the religion, calendar, customs, and history of the Indigenous peoples of Central and Southwestern Mexico.