The objects of Mesoamerican art history are often asked to carry a heavy burden. Having survived any number of inhospitable contexts—the iconoclasm that supported Spanish imperial expansion, imperfect archival preservation, conditions of exchange that left works vulnerable, and other troubles besides—artworks gain a new status in Mesoamerican art history as exemplars of tradition, interpreted as representatives that meaningfully stand in for entire classes of objects now lost simply because they are the works that are known to scholarship. But what if these objects are less emblematic than we think they are—or what if they are best suited to speak only to the specificity of their contexts?

This is the question that animates Catherine DiCesare’s study of the Codex Borbonicus in The Codex Borbonicus Veintena Imagery: Visualizing History, Time, and Ritual in Aztec Solar-Year Festivals. The codex is decidedly at the center of the canon of Mesoamerican art history and one of the field’s major testaments to the Mesoamerican calendar as it was understood in Central Mexico around the time of the initial Spanish military incursion in Mexico. Painted on amate paper sometime around 1520 (much debate about whether the object represents a pre- or post-Conquest creation has long been part of its interpretation), the manuscript presents the sequence of days in the two hundred sixty-day divinatory calendar and their mantic imagery, followed by paintings of the festivals in the three hundred sixty-five-day solar year sequence. The Borbonicus has been through its own share of troubles: now fragmented and palimpsestic, entire pages from both ends of the accordion-folded book are now missing, and glossary inscriptions in Spanish were added at an unknown point in the past. Yet it remains an invaluable source because its imagery is, in some ways, unparalleled: The divinatory calendar (or tonalamatl in Nahuatl) is otherwise best known from examples representing related but distinct cultural traditions or from examples where the mediation of European friar-chroniclers is more acutely felt, and few sources speak so seemingly directly to the practice of the solar year festivals.

Just what the Borbonicus paintings should be a source for is a question to which DiCesare dedicates much of the book’s argument, ultimately contending that the festival paintings in the latter part of the manuscript should be seen foremost as a historical reflection on one year’s practice of the calendar rather than a testament to an immutable or universal tradition. To “dislodge it from its authoritative perch” (37), DiCesare draws our attention to glyphs included amid the paintings that arguably anchor the depiction of the cyclical solar year festivals within the specificity of a historical year of 2 Reed 1507, a cataclysmic period during the reign of Motecuhzoma II. No ordinary date, this historical moment saw superlative famine, drought, and widespread hunger, the culmination of consecutive previous years of disaster. In DiCesare’s argument, the characters, settings, and actions of the solar year festivals depicted in the Borbonicus are different from those that later textual sources might lead us to expect because this extreme historical moment called for adaptations in ritual practice. Another side of the argument proposes that the solar year festivals were also adapted to accommodate the interplay between the divinatory and solar cycles, a topic explored in specific case studies in the latter half of the book. Chapter one lays the groundwork for these arguments, examining the evidence for the festival depictions’ historical specificity and the inflected interactions of the intersecting Mesoamerican calendrical cycles.

Chapter two draws attention to a pair of depictions representing two abutting feasts in the solar calendar: Tozoztontli and Huey Tozoztli. Written texts of the sixteenth century tell us that these are Springtime feasts, celebrated when the stalks of the maize crop reached the height of a farmer’s waist. As DiCesare observes, the maize deity Chicomecoatl is the figure who most frequently appears in representations of these feasts; in the Codex Borbonicus, however, the deity is absent, replaced instead by what is interpreted as images of a ritual honoring the water deity Tlaloc at his mountaintop shrine east of Tenochtitlan. The historical context of the year 2 Reed 1507 makes this substitution understandable: In DiCesare’s interpretation, the scarcity of water explains the shift in emphasis, when the rites observed within the festival calendar would have adapted to address the real need expressed in this year.

Similarly, chapter three is also a study of paired festivals, and it also focuses on unexpected aspects of their representation. Here, the feasts are Tecuilhuitontli and Huey Tecuilhuitl, a forty-day period in summer when ritual practices foreground lordship and kingly gifts of flowers. In the Borbonicus paintings, the paintings are atypical in that they set the first of the festivals in the Mesoamerican ballcourt; no less atypically, the second depicts the flayed god, Xipe Totec, standing before humbly dressed figures holding empty bowls. As DiCesare notes, the differences between the paintings’ representation of the festivals and their representation in comparable texts have led some to question whether the paintings actually represent the festivals at all. However, broad-ranging sources and a turn to monumental sculpture help the author to explicate the scenes within a culture of lordly performance that aligns with the core meanings of the festival cycle, which, DiCesare contends, would have been particularly urgent in the 2 Reed 1507.

From agriculture and lordship, chapter four moves our attention to Quecholli, a festival honoring Mixcoatl, deity of the hunt. Here, DiCesare argues that the intersection of the solar and divinatory calendars affected the particular expression of the festival during 2 Reed 1507. The author posits that during that year, the divinatory calendar date of 2 Rabbit, associated with drunken revelry, would have fallen within the solar-year period of Quecholli; for this reason, the Quecholli painting places a special emphasis on ritual imbibing of the fermented drink pulque that would otherwise prove inexplicable.

The final chapter concerns an oft-studied page of the Codex Borbonicus, painted with a striking image of the New Fire ceremony that was practiced every fifty-two years, which was depicted in concert with the solar-year rites of Panquetzaliztli, the “Raising of the Banners.” Here, DiCesare’s argument is that in 2 Reed 1507, the New Fire drilling aligned with a festival to celebrate the Mexica patron deity Huitzilopochtli in a way that would have mutually amplified the meanings of both events, saturating them with resonance around the cyclical nature of time and the identity of the Mexica as a people.

DiCesare’s book teaches us to see the Codex Borbonicus as a genre-bending manuscript, one that, in the author’s words, “combines ritual, calendrical, and historical information” (189). We also learn to conceive the Central Mexican counts of days and their attendant festivals as a flexible, vital system, where the practice of living in and commemorating time’s passage was inflected by history and experience. In recognizing the specific ways the feasts were expressed in 2 Reed 1507 as DiCesare prepares us to do, the festivals painted in the Codex Borbonicus come productively to appear less universal and more contingent. Yet this interpretation also raises major questions not yet answered: If the paintings depict rituals that took place in 2 Reed 1507, why are they being painted in the 1520s, the likely date of creation suggested by this book and other scholarship? Why should the manuscript’s artists look back to paint this terrible year? What desires for historical representation, in other words, might be teased from these pages, and what artistic agency and context might have made this kind of memorialization possible? Perhaps too many unknowns surround the context of the creation of the Borbonicus to speak to these issues with great certainty, but future work in these directions might help us to see the Codex not only as a representation of time past but also as an artwork alive to its own moment, much as this study helps us to see the Mesoamerican calendar as a system that responded to the flow of history through time.