Royal visions; art of the Maya courts

Art in America, Dec, 2004 by Anna Blume

Eighteen years after a landmark exhibition, "The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art" (1986), fundamentally changed our understanding of Maya historical iconography, a remarkable curatorial effort brings us closet' than we have ever been to the multidimensional, social and lived aspects of the Maya nobility. (1) Created by Yale University Mayanist Mary Miller, veteran of "The Blood of Kings," and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco curator Kathleen Berrin, "Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya" gathers together 130 objects ranging from small carved shells and intricately painted ceramics to giant stelae. Nearly half of the works have never before been seen in the U.S. This is the first Maya exhibition to comprise objects borrowed from so many collections all over the world, 30 altogether, many of them located in the regions from which the works originate.

Over the past half-century, as Maya hieroglyphics have been deciphered and the texts translated, our increased ability to comprehend the culture has fundamentally changed how we interpret the constantly transforming figures on limestone, jade and shell carvings, in stucco portraits and on slip-painted clay pots, all objects that the ancient Maya left behind, from the Chiapas rainforests to the Honduran border. Together they constitute one of the world's great inventories of figural and abstract metamorphosis: words slip into images and human figures into animals; bodies convey in their twisting postures aspects of sacrifice, dance, lordship and captivity. Until recently, such representations were barely comprehended. Archeologists and researchers considered the Maya, cultivators of maize and expensive cacao, to be a priestly, comparatively passive civilization, especially in contrast to their neighbors to the north, the Toltecs and Aztecs. Now we understand that the Maya were governed by elaborate and often violent courts, the epicenter of their city-states. The Maya were just more subtle than the Aztecs in expressing their extravagant rituals and beliefs, using a script that sequesters content between words and images.

Between 600 and 800 A.D., at the height of what is called the Late Classic period, the Maya established more than 60 independent city states around ceremonial sites that included the famous massive stone-faced pyramids. Courts at such Mexican and Guatemalan locales as Palenque, Yaxchilan and Tonina, and further south, in Honduras, at Copan, included warriors, scribes, musicians, artists, tradesmen and priests, ruled by lords with dominion over territories supporting as many as 100,000 inhabitants. Each court was intensely aware of the others. They challenged each other for decades at a stretch, strutting about in performances, undertaking battles and construction campaigns, and competitively pressuring each other to attain ever higher levels of expressive display. Maya city-state culture continued into the 10th century at such Yucatan sites as Chichen Itza, and then mysteriously collapsed, 400 years before the Spanish invasion.

Though filled with exuberant works, overall this exhibition has a quietness about it. We are prompted to attend closely to the many intricate details and exquisite lines that convey both the personal desires and ideological messages, often encoded in text, of those who commissioned the works. Many have inscribed dates calculated according to the Long Count, a way of marking historical time that scholars first identified in the 1960s. One carved limestone hieroglyphic inscription on a lintel from Yaxchilan includes a date that is equivalent to Feb. 11,526, when K'inich Tatb'u Skull II, a ruler of this northern Guatemalan city-state, ascended to the throne. The Long Count began on a specific day in the year 3114 B.C., when, the Maya believed, their gods extracted blood from themselves and mixed it with cornmeal to make humans. K'inich Tatb'u Skull II and other lords had Long Count dates carved on public works both to locate themselves within historical time and to place themselves among the gods, heroes and supernatural entities who had initiated and continued to perpetuate humanity.

The text of this inscription is meticulously carved in so-called "full-figure" forms of animals and human faces, rather than the more fragmented shorthand of most Maya hieroglyphics. It reveals the essentially hybrid and multivalent nature of Maya writing, filled with combinations of animate and inanimate elements that stand for sound, word or symbol [see sidebar].

Just as Maya inscriptions can be intricately visual, so can visual representations be calligraphic, as in a number of so-called "eccentric" flints on view. The Maya collected and carved flint using the pointed tips of deer antler to chip out sharp-edged, anthropomorphic figures whose puckered lips and appendages spread out from vertical spines. Cipherlike, their silhouetted forms--part symbol, part icon--appear to dance, animated and petrified all at once. Carved ceremonial flints were often buried, not with people, but in caches beneath important monuments, having functioned in rituals performed upon the completion of a temple, or when stelae were dedicated. The Maya believed that flints stored value that remained active indefinitely, for, according to myth, they were created when limestone was struck by lightning, which remained in them, ready to ignite sparks when the flints were struck.