Maya, Rivera Show Powerful Images; The Maya had a savage streak, as a traveling art exhibit demonstrates, but the 20th century Mexican artist Diego Rivera also created his share of troubling art

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 27, 2004

Byline: Stephen Goode, INSIGHT

Fifty years ago scholars thought the Maya, an ancient people of Central America, had a peaceful culture ruled by astronomer-priests admirably adept at mathematics, stargazing and architecture. It was an understandable error: The world long had been aware of the ruins of great Mayan cities, the Mayan calendar and the sophisticated Mayan number system.

But all that has changed. The Mayan language has been decoded and its texts can be read. Also, the world now knows the mural paintings at Bonampak, a great Mayan city, which depict warriors and their king and queen celebrating bloody victory over an enemy. Here were a people clearly anything but peaceful.

A reconstructed segment of the mural at Bonampak, along with more than 130 works of art and craft, makes up "Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya," an extraordinary exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the first show of Mayan art to tour the United States.

The exhibition, as its title suggests, focuses entirely on the works made for Mayan royal families and the nobility, and comes mostly from the seventh and eighth centuries, the high point of Mayan civilization, which went into marked decline after the year 800, though no one is quite certain why. But the focus on the privileged classes doesn't disappoint. Far from it. There are a wealth of artifacts to consider, from sculpture and painting to jewelry and functional items such as bowls. And the lower strata aren't absent after all, the king and nobility needed to be served and defended but appear in the form of the warriors, scribes, musicians and others painted and sculpted by anonymous Mayan artists.

The Mayan world was not centralized at one major population center, but was an amalgam of city-states, around 50 altogether, with names such as Bonampak, Palenque, Tikal, Yaxchilan, Copan and Tonina, each with its own royal family and court. The city-states, which often warred against one another, were located in what is today southern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and parts of Honduras and El Salvador.

A lion's share of the show is sculpture made of stucco or carved from stone, and Maya artists were skilled at both. The torso and head of the maize god, made of volcanic tuff and found at Copan in Honduras, for example, catches the principal figure in Mayan religion during what must be spring, as he seems to awaken, his face in contemplation, his arms put forward in graceful gesture.

One of the best human images in the exhibition is the head of Pakal, whose 68-year reign as king of Palenque (615-683) makes him one of the longest-ruling monarchs of all time. Done in stucco and about 17 inches high, the head was discovered in 1952 by Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz. Pakal's name was deciphered 21 years later, in 1973. According to the show's first-rate catalog, the sculpture displays Mayan ideals of beauty: a narrow face and large nose. From his aristocratic bearing, there is no mistaking this man's status as king. The flowers emerging from Pakal's headgear may be cacao blossoms, his topknot may be the foliage of maize.

Women played key roles in Mayan society, at least at its top levels. And the best-known queen of Mayan history as well as its most renowned woman was Lady Xok (pronounced shoke), who lived in the eighth century and was wife to King Shield Jaguar of Yaxchilan. As powerful women often have done throughout history, Lady Xok commissioned three major artworks for a temple in this case reliefs carved from limestone that are in this show. They are impressive sculptures and provide an unforgettable look into Mayan culture and ways of life among the privileged.

One relief, perhaps the most powerful, depicts an elegantly dressed Lady Xok kneeling before her husband, who holds a torch above Xok's head. The queen herself is engaged in pulling a thorn-studded rope through her tongue, a bloodletting ritual performed at night and intended as a sacrifice to the gods. The Mayans believed the gods had used their own blood to create mankind and that through human bloodletting the gods could be repaid for their gift of life. Indeed, every aspect of Mayan life seems to have been woven around what they thought had happened to the gods and what humans should do to mimic those happenings.

The Mayan creation story, the Popol Vuh, tells how the maize god each year descends into the underworld, where he is decapitated in a ball game and then reborn when the rainy season begins. The Maya looked upon their favorite sport, a game played with a heavy, solid ball, as a replay of the maize god's annual experience. Competition in the game was intense the losers themselves sometimes were sacrificed, a fate that would no doubt spur tough battles against opponents. This exhibition has two ceramic figurines of Maya engaged in a ball game. Only about five inches tall, the athletes seem frozen forever at play in their favorite pastime, if "play" be the right word for a game at which so much may have been at stake.