Posted on 01/22/2006 3:24:22 PM PST by blam
Published January 22, 2006
[ From the Lansing State Journal ]
Mexican painting has both Christian, Aztec influences
Unearthed mural shows melding of cultures
(Photo by Associated Press) Flying into view: This image of a bird is part of the 16-yard-long mural at an excavation in Mexico City.
By Mark Stevenson
Associated Press
Salvador Guilliem dangles on a narrow beam over the sunken remains of a mural painted by Indians shortly after the Spanish conquest.
Guilliem, an archaeologist, points out the newly excavated red, green and ochre flourishes in one of the earliest paintings to show the mixing of the two cultures.
The vivid scene of animals real and mythical cavorting around the edge of lakes that once shimmered in Mexico City was painted by Aztec Indians in the early 1530s during a rare, brief moment of tolerance in an era when Spaniards were obliterating Aztec culture to cement their own rule.
Guilliem, who found the mural beneath the floor of a former Spanish convent, uses the beam to avoid treading on or touching the painting, done on the sides of a water-holding pool that was later ceremonially crushed and buried. Because of the burial, the bottom half of the 16-yard-long mural was preserved. But the top half - about one yard in height - was broken into about 25,000 fragments, which archaeologists must now painstakingly reassemble.
It's worth the effort. Mexican society itself is a jigsaw puzzle of Indian and Spanish influences, and the mural is like a snapshot of how that rich cultural mix began.
"It's all coming together here in a syncretic mix, a fusion of two styles of thought," Guilliem tells The Associated Press at the site in the downtown Tlatelolco square, where a jumble of Aztec ruins and colonial-era structures are surrounded by busy avenues and buildings constructed in the 1960s.
At the center of the 16-yard-long painting is a stark Christian cross in black and white, floating above a much more colorful, lively lakeside scene of fishermen, frogs, fish and other creatures.
To the right of the cross and below it, the Indians painted an ahuizotl, a mythical Aztec animal with paws resembling hands that was considered a servant or representative of the Aztec rain god, Tlaloc. To the left, there is a jaguar with a stylized plant on its back, upon which rests an eagle - a reference to pre- Hispanic place names and the kingdoms that ruled before the Spanish came.
Indians also drew closely observed and gracefully executed depictions of lakeside plants, some of which were used in traditional Aztec medicine.
The story of how and why the mural was created and buried provides a unique glimpse into the culture clash that emerged in the first years after Hernan Cortes and his Spanish troops conquered the Aztecs in 1521.
Archeologists first suspected its presence in 2002 after workers digging a drainage trench turned up pieces of colored plaster. After a year and a half of digging, the work is now about 75 percent excavated.
Archaeologist Eduardo Matos has called it one of the earliest surviving works from the period, saying it was probably painted by Aztec artists who were educated at an unusual college set up by Franciscan monks for the children of Indian nobles.
These Aztec painters managed to have a remarkable degree of self-expression for the era. The Spanish usually required Indians to paint as close to the European style as they could.
But the Franciscan monks at Tlatelolco tried to defend the Indians from enslavement and were eager to learn Aztec language, customs and history. The monks also may not have recognized some of the references to older gods and other cultural symbols that the Aztecs wove into the mural.
But even with the early Franciscans' tolerance, Guilliem says some details in the mural reflect a "conflict of interests between the priests and the painter."
Most of the human figures - even some wearing Indian dress - are depicted with European features and drawn in European style using perspective, rather than the Aztec's one- dimensional profiles. But the European faces are mere outline drawings - neither filled in, fleshed out or colored with the still-bright natural tints used in the rest of the mural.
"The priest directing the work says, 'Do it this way,' " Guilliem says, "and the Tlacuilo (Indian painter) says, 'Yes,' but then he goes on to do the other elements that really interest him, and he never finishes" the faces.
The relative independence of the monks at Tlatelolco was tolerated for only a few decades by Spanish rulers, who began to object to the Franciscans' tactic of educating Indians - and learning from them - while converting them to Christianity.
But the artists at Tlatelolco didn't give in entirely. When the pool fell into disuse and the mural was buried around 1600, the Indians performed what appears to have been an entirely Aztec ritual to appease the pre-Hispanic spirits of the painting.
They carefully deposited the shattered fragments of the upper half of the painting in the lower half of the pool, along with the remains of hundreds of ritually sacrificed animals. They burned the animals' remains and buried them with a female fertility fetish and the statue of Napantecuhtli, an Aztec god
"For them," Guilliem said, "this was sacred, because of what they had depicted there."
GGG Ping.
Art ping
BTTT
Boy!~ AP did a fine job of captuting the essence of the mural in that picture L0L
If you stare at it long enough, Casper the Ghost eventually appears.
Art ping.
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Interesting! Off topic, I read that Aztecs and Mayans had lighter skin and hair and they went through the "Age of Black Hair", which occurred 6,000 years ago, like many American Indian went through, which is why they have darker skin and hair color. Many American Indians were lighter skined and have the same blood type you see in Caucasians. Some have the same rate of Rh negative blood in Basques and Celts, most notably Mapuches, Incas, and Mayans. In fact, it was common for Indians to have blonde and red hair. Everytime I see Indians, they look more Caucasian to me, rather than Mongoloid. I would suspect Indians first came as Ainu and Polynesian and later Cro-Magnon man.
Leni
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***At the center of the 16-yard-long painting is a stark Christian cross in black and white,****
Are they sure it is a CHRISTIAN CROSS and not a MORNING STAR CEREMONY torture stake? They both look alike.
Ok
They say this like it was a bad thing. On the contrary, thank heavens the Aztec culture of mass human sacrifice, ritual cannibalism, and war to supply victims for the slaughter was "obliterated". The surrounding native tribes gleefully assisted the Spanish in obliterating the hated and feared Aztecs.
Thanks for the link. Interesting read. Humans probably had civilizations for many years, easily more than 10,000 years, only to wiped out by catacylsmic events, so evidence of them are scant.
Yup. The end of the Ice Age flooded them out. They were probably in Sundaland, a real good/warm place to spend the Ice Age. It went underwater...some say it was Atlantis.
I tend to agree that Atlantis was in present day Indonesia. The way Plato described, it occurred 9,000 years before he existed and the description of Atlantis. Indonesia fits the bill for sure. Some people think there was a another Atlantis is what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.
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