On Pre-Columbian Art

　

　

Pre-Columbian art appalls and fascinates due to its strangeness. Walking among the frog-eyed gods and coiled snakes carved from spongy-looking volcanic rock, the tourist finds nothing commensurate with European norms of beauty – it’s all majestically unfamiliar: oblong mother goddesses carved from stone obelisks spurt curved and vegetal flourishes of blood from their severed necks, bony cadavers strain to give birth, huge stucco masks extrude tongues shaped like obsidian daggers. The figures are without grace, eyeless with skeletal jaws, raw blocks of pumice-like magma cut into inexpressive heads and arms raised to show flat, bestial palms, hands more like the paws of a jungle cat than the human fingers that gripped the artisan’s chisel. This is a culture without Socrates or Jesus, and its art is as alien to our imaginations as an artifact from outer space – and, indeed, many of these objects are excoriated, carved from pitted lava so that, it seems, they have been sculpted from iron and rocky debris from the farthest zones of the solar system, strange meteorites fallen from interplanetary space. Even the relatively lithe and terpsichorean idols made by the Maya are utterly bizarre – at first, the figures seem classical, well-shaped with serpentine limbs, but, before we can acclimate ourselves to these forms, we are struck by what they are doing – a noble-woman tugs a thorn encrusted coil of paper through her tongue, bleeding onto a heap of gore-soaked tissue. Fire blazes in the bloody paper and the smoke from that burning coalesces into jaws that open to disgorge a monster with fangs and pedipalps like a centipede that cradle a small, impassive human head. Masked dancers prance beneath insect-haunted heavens carrying human heads like lanterns. The face of a flayed man stares at us implacably, lidless eyes like boiled eggs.

What is most noteworthy is an absence: there are no female nudes, indeed, there is no conception whatsoever of lissome female beauty. The ancient Pre-Columbians did not regard the unadorned human body as beautiful. Unlike the Greeks and Romans, these people equated nudity with defeat and a horrible death – the only figures who are nude in Pre-Columbian art are bound, naked warriors awaiting death by torture. The Greeks stripped to compete; the ancient Americans went to war adorned so massively that their great chiefs and sachems could scarcely move – nudity was abject and disgraceful and a well-dressed Aztec warrior wore gloves made from the flayed hands of those he had killed, carried heads and scalps festooned around his neck, bore over his painted face a massive multi-tiered headdress imitating the different realities in the universe (the celestial world, earth, the underworld) – over his buttocks, he wore a ballooning bustle and feathered roach. With leggings cut from jaguar fur and gold gorgets and silver ear-spools and pinnacles of quetzal feathers, his features anonymous beneath a mask of flayed human skin or the wooden or stucco visage of his gods, the Pre-Columbians brought the art of personal adornment to its highest and most baroque state. In some Mayan and Mixtec art, the costume is so immense and architectural that it is almost impossible to see the tiny human figure within that carapace of mummified heads, feathers, and crowns atop crowns.

Western art is based most fundamentally on the notion that the nude human being is the measure of all beauty and the quintessence of the divine. Pre-Columbians viewed human nudity as disgraceful. For the slender beauty of Aphrodite, they substitute a single, awe-inspiring leit motif, an imago that underlies and motivates all of their greatest artistic works: the body stripped of its flesh, the skeleton, the grinning skull. Search the corridors and darkened galleries of the great Mexican museums of Pre-Columbian art: look for sculptures of nude women. You will find none. In their place, leer a thousand thousand eyeless and toothy skulls.