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The Art of the Deal, 1828

In 1828, the National Museum in Mexico City engaged in an unusual exchange with the French traveler Henri Baradère. The museum traded a collection of pre-Columbian antiquities and manuscripts describing the ruins of Palenque to Baradère for an assortment of not particularly rare mounted birds. The exchange violates present-day notions of value: long after insects had destroyed Baradère’s specimens, Palenque continued to excite the imagination of explorers, antiquarians, and fortune-seekers. Rather than judging the outcome of the deal against modern-day actuarial tables, this article explores the motives that led Isidro Icaza, the museum’s first director, to consider the exchange profitable and reconstructs the trajectories and meanings of objects that entered and exited the museum. It reflects on the situation of national museums in Latin America in the post-Independence decades, on the criteria that governed the formation of their collections, and on the strategies they employed to establish autonomy and command institutional recognition as international protagonists in the traffic of collectables.