The Mysterious Maya, Sitting in the Eye of the God of Blood

Maya figure sitting in the eye of a god, the Monster of the Mountain, Rio Bec

Just look at this figure as part of the façade of the tomb of a Maya king. Beautifully sculpted in the round with decorative belt, necklace, ankle and wrist bracelets, earrings and hair ornaments, this male figure sits (dare he?) in the corner of the eye of a god. Who braves to conceive of putting a man in the corner of a god's eye? Yet, there he sits comfortably, one leg hanging down, head looking down on those below, mouth in what I call, "the Maya pout." The startling beauty of its rounded form and the daring of its location draws attention, and the thought comes,"How very Maya."

Typical, yes there is such a thing. Diego Rivera, the famous Mexican muralist, was criticized for the longest time for his representations of rather full-bodied figures. His response was that he was painting in the ancient traditions of the Mexican people, though there was no proof of it in anything know at the time. Then in 1946 a Lacandon Maya, Chan Bor, lead outsiders to the Temple of the Murals in Bonampak, still at the time a place of worship for the Lacandon. Once the information came out about the "discovery" of these walls of murals painted with stocky figures, the Mexican government flew Diego Rivera to the hard to reach location so he could see the murals. Upon seeing them, he cried.

Musicians in a court procession, playing tortoise shell instruments, Bonampak.

The great event represented on the walls of Bonampak, a name which means "Painted Walls," is the ascension to the throne of a new ruler. The paintings fill three rooms at the top of a T-shaped platform and were done by artist from nearby Yaxchilan, which was tied by marriage to the royalty of Bonampak. The paintings were finished in 800 A.D. and the life of Bonampak a few years later, pointing out the great mystery of the Maya. What really happened in the 8th and 9th centuries to cause these great Maya cities and their beautiful art to disappear from history?

Stelae showing the image of the most famous King of Copan, 18 Images of Ka'wiil, sometimes still referred to as 18 Rabbit.

Among the great cities that shockingly disappeared was Copan. Ruled by one dynasty starting in c. 400 A.D. and lasting through 16 rulers, Copan benefited from its location far south of the central Maya area, which was filled with conflicts and wars between neighboring kingdoms. Copan used commerce and diplomacy to increase its power and wealth. It reached its height during the reign of the king featured here. A mistake in translation named him 18 Rabbit, but his real name is Waxaclajuun U'baah Ka'wiil, which had nothing to do with rabbits. It actually means 18 Images of the God of Blood. Sounds frightening, but this king ruled through art and diplomacy, establishing a cultural hegemony to go along with Copan's commercial clout. However, as all Maya kings did, he did ritual blood sacrifice, including piercing his own body to let the royal blood flow out.

I must say that I have always been drawn to the Maya lands, as I remember a wonderful trip in my youth to the Yucatan, where I felt quite at home. I was always attracted to Copan, though of the Maya ruins I have been able to see and study, far off Copan was out of my reach. However, I have always been struck by the beauty of the faces done in Copan and especially those of this king. The figure pictured here is surrounded by intricate designs carved into the limestone and originally painted. The eyes are cast down and the mouth is open, sometimes just barely, sometimes in a circle. The hands normally were delicately curled inward or with forefingers and little fingers standing out and the two inner fingers curled inward. One can be sure these gestures meant something, but I have yet to find any definitive meaning assigned to them.

However, art and culture were not enough. After 43 years in power, which represented the height of Copan's power and prestige, Waxaclajuun U'baah Ka'wiil's choice for leadership of the vassal state of Quirigua decided to rebel. The horror of it for Copan (every time I think of it, I feel somehow connected to that day in May of 738 A.D.) was that the King of Copan (it comes to me "our beautiful king") was captured and killed, ceremonially beheaded in fact. Well, things did not completely end as there were three more kings who managed the relationship with Quirigua. However, activity in Quirigua ended in 800 and in Copan in 820, after which dates they both disappear from history, followed by most of the Mesoamerican world from Teotihuacan to the Maya kingdoms. What happened?

Was it drought, deforestation, or all consuming war? Perhaps it was a trifecta of disasters that caused the people to try a remedy steeped in their beliefs about the cosmos.

It involved the calling of a Calendar Convention in a hilltop location considered neutral by all, Xochicalco, or The House of Flowers. The calendar was an important instrument not just for planting and sowing but for knowing which god to worship on which day. I am sure that the delegates there in 859 A.D. talked of things other than the calculations, things like crop failures, lack of rain, and incessant warring. By the way, Xochicalco is near the town of Cuernavaca, which sent a representative, duly noted on the commemorative pyramid proudly featuring the Maya in dominant display, as they probably called the convention. Our representative from Cuahnahuac (Cuernavaca) was a crouched man in a blanket holding a plant with three sprigs, a symbol still used in Cuernavaca. I say "our representative" because I was studying in Cuernavaca and going to Xochicalco was part of a course on Mesoamerican art history. Well, regardless of the convention, the Classical Maya Period came to an end by the year 900 A.D., with their great cities all being abandoned.

A cylindrical vessel showing two Maya dignitaries have a smoke while waiting to go before the newly crowned king of Bonampak.

Current theories point to all consuming war as the main reason for the ultimate destruction. War took on a different form, one in which it was not just about killing the leader, but one that turned on the people of the conquered king, destroying their ability to produce what was needed to keep society going (see the video recommended below). So we are left with many beautiful things, like this vase with ornately decorated figures (just look at those headdresses) in a customary pose: having a smoke of tobacco. They were just going about their normal activities as though everything would continue as it always had. Of course it didn't for them, but another period in Maya history, now called Post-Classical, started in the Yucatan peninsula and lasted until the coming of the Spanish, which brought the great days of the Maya to an end.

There are currently millions of Maya in Mexico and in Central America, who live no more as lords of their own lands. I hope that they will soon no longer be sitting in the eye of the God of Blood, and come forth once again, as represented below, like gods born from the insides of flowers.

Statue of a god emerging from inside of a calla lily, from the Island of Jaina near Campeche

I dedicate this post to Waxaclajuun U'baah Ka'wiil, Lord of Copan.

How would you link Diego Rivera's love of mural painting to his affinity for ancient Mexican culture?

Watch the documentary, Who Killed the Maya? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQU56gqyQyU

I also used as reference, Les Mayas Tresors d'une Civilisation Ancienne by Davide Domenici

For my author page of art and travel-inspired writing,

amazon.com/author/marjorievernelle and for more info on a famous work of art, plus tidbits on good wine, go to my site

OfArtandWine.com

#mayas #copan #18rabbit #diegorivera

Photos are from public domain stock photos or my photos from Domenici's book and used in accordance with Fair Use Policy.

© Marjorie Vernelle 2019

Frida Kahlo: Accidents and Identity

Frida, Self Portrait with Loose Hair, 1947 The inscription says "Here I painted myself, Frida Kahlo, with the image from a mirror. I am 37 years old, and it is the month of July in 1947, in Coyoacan, Mexico, the place where I was born."

"There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worse." Well, there we have it straight from the artist herself about her two marriages to Diego Rivera of whom she said when she was a girl at the National Preparatory School where he was painting a mural, "One day I am going to marry him." Prescience or fatal attraction, we can debate which. What is known is that the "dove and the elephant," as Frida's disapproving mother called them on their wedding day, through marital turmoil, infidelity, break-ups and make-ups were inextricably linked by lines drawn in paint and the ties of artistry.

At 15 when she first met Diego at the Preparatory School, he spoke to her of the great artists of the day, many of whom were his friends, of Paris and the avant-garde, and of a life far from what she had ever known. One wonders what effect his words had, not to mention the great talent she saw him applying to the walls to paint a mural called "The Creation." Little did they know what was also being created. Just seven years later, in 1929, after being reintroduced and starting an affair, they married, despite (or perhaps because of ?) the disproportion in their size and their age (Rivera was taller, many pounds heavier, and 21 years her senior). However, the Frida who married Rivera was not the girl she had once been. In the interlude between their first and second meetings, she had suffered her first accident, the horrible one on the trolley in Mexico City. It left her crippled severely for life, in constant pain, body braces, and many times alone. She turned her pain into art, and art saved her. "Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all of this. I think work is the best."

My Dress Hangs Here by Frida Kahlo, 1933

The early years of their marriage were ones of travel to the various places where Diego Rivera was painting murals, and where, though she painted, she was simply Mrs. Diego Rivera. I find it interesting in this painting that the title focuses on one item among the many presented here, her dress. Even though there is a canvas of a woman in a red dress, it is the Mexican style outfit at the center that is Frida saying, "Yes, I am here, too." Humoristically and sarcastically, she has hung her emblem, her dress of strikingly Mexican origin, on a lavender ribbon strung between a toilet and a trophy, both themselves on pedestals just high enough to hold a clothesline. One can imagine all kinds of symbolic meanings for those two items on pedestals. Perhaps she saw them as one and the same thing, the trophy being no more important than a toilet and both being put to practical use to hang her Tehuana dress. Jorge Alberto Lozoya has written in his essay, "Kahlo and Ambiguity" that she fought against the oppressiveness of being an outsider by being extravagantly different "in front of the unassailable fortress of bourgeois morality and the social graces, wielded without pity by those who, sure of their normalcy, made it a daggar, a gallow, a fire" (The World of Frida Kahlo, p. 71)

Display from Brooklyn Museum show "Frida Kahlo, Appearances Can Be Deceiving" Here a Tehuana huipil and skirt.

And yes, her way of being different in the North American and European worlds she traveled in was to point out her Mexican ethnicity, focusing not on the Hispanic part but on the Indian. The loose fitting garb offered her practicality, in that it was comfortable for someone wearing a body brace, who also had a severe limb to cover up, and it made a colorful statement about her self-chosen identity. Like Diego Rivera, who often chose ways of representing figures that he claimed were purely Mexican in their style (a claim that was scoffed at until the Maya murals of Bonampak were found), Kahlo chose to wear her identity as well as paint it. The world of her painting is completely personal and closed. It is said that part of the attraction for collectors is the paintings allow the viewer to enter into a world that someone else has already experienced for them (Billeter, The World of Frida Kahlo, p.11). One thing for sure she knew her own mind. André Breton longed for her to declare herself a surrealist, but she was not of that persuasion. Erika Billeter in her essay, "World of Truth - World of Utopia" compares Frida Kahlo to Virginia Woolf in the ability to express a distinctly female thinking, born out of personal suffering and, as women, of being outsiders.

The Deceased Dimas by Frida Kahlo, 1937.

When one says female thinking, it does not mean that it never goes to hard places. Kahlo went there often, whether it be her physical pain and heartbreak for not being able to have children, a result of that horrible accident, or her emotional pain around her "second accident," Diego. She could plumb the depths, as we see here in this painting. It was purchased by a woman who thought she was buying a portrait of a beautiful Mexican child in ceremonial dress. Only later did she realize that the child was in fact dead and dressed for his funeral, the only day in his brief life that he was a king. The painting was returned to Kahlo. Even here, though, we see Kahlo celebrating her Mexican culture, a culture that is ancient and knows well that life has no guaranties of longevity. And yes, Kahlo "goes there" whether showing her distress in trying to have children or thinking of her own death, as she does in a self-portrait with an image of death painted on her forehead (Thinking About Death, 1943).

Famously, as her own end neared and her painting had made her known by her own name, Frida Kahlo, she was determined to enjoy her success, regardless of her physical condition. In 1953, she was given a retrospective in Mexico, and despite her ill health she arrived at the gallery in an ambulance and participated in the festivities from a bed that had been prepared for her there. After suffering an amputation of a leg in 1954, her health declined, and she passed away on July 13, 1954 in the now famous Blue House in Coyoacan, Mexico. I leave you with her parting thoughts, "I hope the exit is joyful, and I hope never to return."

What do you find most intriguing about Frida Kahlo's work? Log in to tell us.

The photos of the display in the Brooklyn Museum come from the New York Times article linked here https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/arts/design/frida-kahlo-review-brooklyn-museum.html

The quotes by Kahlo come from "30 Frida Kahlo Quotes to Inspire" https://www.goalcast.com/2017/11/28/17-frida-kahlo-quotes/

Other photos shown here were taken by me from The Blue House: The World of Frida Kahlo,

a catalog from The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, edited by Erika Billeter, 1993. It includes the essays mentioned above by Lozoya and by Billeter. Photos are used in accordance with Fair Use Policy for purposes of critique and information.

#fridakahlo #diegorivera

For more on Marjorie Vernelle, see the author page at amazon.com/author/marjorievernelle

She also has an engaging art history blog that talks of painting and wine on ofartandwine.com

© Marjorie Vernelle 2019