Piecing Together a God’s Journey

RICHLY DECORATED Mesoamerican artifacts have filled Italian collections for hundreds of years. Once displayed in noble families’ “cabinets of curiosities” as exotic creations of the distant New World, by the nineteenth century, many such objects had been installed in newly founded ethnographic museums, where they were placed alongside antiquities from much older civilizations. Davide Domenici, a historical anthropologist at the University of Bologna, has long been fascinated by a particular type of mosaic-covered Mesoamerican sculpture. Recently, he began to wonder how these sculptures had made their way to Italy. For some of the artworks, the clues lay, in part, close to home. “My office at the university is the very room where some of these objects were displayed before they were moved to Rome’s Luigi Pigorini National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography in 1885,” he says. “That’s one of the reasons why I felt pushed to investigate their history.”

Domenici began his quest by focusing on a number of turquoise-covered Mesoamerican objects that he knew had once been in Bologna, Florence, and Rome. He searched Italian archives and museum inventories for evidence of their provenance, and discovered that at