Royal visions; art of the Maya courts

Art in America, Dec, 2004 by Anna Blume

Lightning was seen to belong to the upper world of the sun, moon and stars, and is personified by the god K'awiil, protector of kings and patron of fertility of body and mind. The Maya often depict K'awiil as he is shown in a scepter of unknown provenance, with a head bursting into flames, a gaping bestial mouth and a single long, conspicuous leg that ends in a serpent's wide-open maw, teeth bared and forked tongue splayed. In addition to his other attributes, this K'awiil has his head thrown back like that of a sacrificial victim and his hair tied up much in the manner of the Maize God, who was often depicted with long, thick tresses bundled like corn stalks after the harvest. This associates the god with the central belief that only with the fallen stalks will a new crop arrive, and that from sacrifice one is made sacred and linked to creation. As an implement of power that would have been carried by the ruler, a scepter filled with such symbolism would link its bearer to a rich cosmogony.

A focal point of the exhibition is the section titled "Palenque: An Exemplary Maya Court," in which the curators have gathered more than 20 works from the famous court that flourished under Pakal the Great and his descendants in the 7th and 8th centuries. Palenque remains one of the best preserved and most visited sites in Chiapas. Since it was first rediscovered by the modern world in the 18th century, it has stood out as an often idealized ruin; European-biased observers favorably compared it to ancient Greece because of the mathematical precision of its architecture, set into the surrounding hillside. Palenque prompted some writers of the 19th century, among them the French abbot and scholar Brasseur de Bourbourg, to formulate the fantastical theory that all civilizations sprang from Latin America and subsequently migrated to the "Old World." To our thinking such notions seem outlandish, but we need only contemplate the fine portraits of Pakal and other members of his family, along with their delicately carved jade masks and adornments, to feel ourselves in the presence of a highly refined, still vastly unknown past.

At Palenque, artists modeled stucco made from finely powdered limestone that hardened into sensual, lifelike forms, such as the freestanding fragment, a portrait head of Pakal, broken off of a body that no longer exists. Ornamented and dignified, the monarch stares from beneath fully rounded lids, his mouth slightly open and his nose sculpted into a prominent, almost architectural form. His hair is coifed to symbolize the natural and supernatural worlds: at once maize foliage and Jester-God dangle, with the bangs of a fashionable 7th-century nobleman.

Equally skilled in monumental limestone carving and the minute working of jade for jewelry or small precious flares, the artists of Palenque were also masterful ceramists. In an extraordinary 33-inch-high ceramic censer stand, for example, the artist depicts a serene, deeply modeled face of a woman surrounded by a teeming combination of inanimate and animate forms, from vultures to serpents, topped with a miniature seated lord holding a censer of his own.