The Power of Images
Brightly colored wall paintings were a common feature across the ancient world, decorating Egyptian tombs, Pompeian houses, Byzantine churches, Cambodian temples, and Maya palaces. Some of the most stunning examples of this art form are the vividly painted murals created by the Maya and their contemporaries in the first millennium A.D.
For the ancient Mesoamericans, murals were more narrative than decorative. Large-scale paintings at sites such as Bonampak in the Mexican state of Chiapas and Calakmul in Campeche depict mythological scenes, heroic battles, and life in opulent royal courts, and can offer insights into how the inhabitants of ancient Mesoamerica lived and worshipped.
Despite the number of well-preserved examples, however, little is known about how these paintings were actually made. It has long been recognized that Mesoamerican murals were the work of more than one artist, but questions about them have persisted, including how many artists worked on a particular painting, how the project was coordinated, how long the work would have taken, and whether artists traveled from site to site or were trained locally. A lesser known – but nonetheless dazzling – group of ancient Mesoamerican murals may provide scholars with some of the most convincing evidence yet for how these artworks were created.
The site of Cacaxtla in the state of Tlaxcala, about 60 miles southeast of Mexico City, was first discovered by ditchdiggers in 1975. For the past decade, Claudia Brittenham of the University of Chicago has been studying the site’s murals. The name Cacaxtla means “backpack” in Nahuatl, and an image of a backpack laden with luxury goods in one of the murals suggests the name may have persisted since antiquity. But scholars can only say for certain that it has been in use since Spanish colonial times.
Cacaxtla was the seat of a small state wedged between the Valley of Mexico and the Gulf Coast, nestled in the shadow of three volcanoes. The fact that few elite burials or high-quality ceramics have been found either there or in a much earlier pyramid complex about a mile west called Xochitécatl suggests that the area was never very prosperous. Yet sometime between A.D. 600 and 900, the inhabitants of Cacaxtla created a large palace and completely covered its walls with frescoes depicting animals, deities, and royal court scenes. Perhaps the most impressive among them portrays a battle between a local army and forces that, judging from their war regalia, appear to be from several different states. Brittenham’s focus has been to try to understand how and why a tiny, peripheral state in the Puebla Valley created ambitious wall paintings on par with any found at the great Maya sites in southern Mexico and Guatemala.
One of the ways Cacaxtla would have been able to execute these taxing and labor-intensive projects, Brittenham thinks, would have been to employ teams to work on the murals at roughly the same time. In the case of the “Battle Mural”, she believes there were at least six and as many as 13 painters working simultaneously. By contrast, the spectacular murals at Bonampak, often called the finest such works yet discovered in the Americas, were probably painted by two or three artists, according to Mesoamerican art historian Mary Miller of Yale University. Brittenham has documented subtle but consistent variations in the depiction of noses, clothing, and other features that, she says, point to collaborative work in the mural.
Brittenham believes the Maya influences visible in the murals offer evidence that cultural exchange – and not just trade in valuable goods such as chocolate or shells – was more fluid in ancient Mesoamerica than once believed. No longer do scholars accept that this was a collection of insular states that had little or no cultural contact with one another, as they once believed. Rather, “it’s looking more and more connected,” says Brittenham. Despite Cacaxtla’s small size, it was at the crossroads of this world. Its earliest murals were painted soon after the fall of nearby Teotihuacán. This large and culturally influential city about 100 miles from Cacaxtla was violently sacked and burned around A.D. 550 either by invaders or during a civil uprising. Cacaxtla’s golden age of mural painting thus came at a time of upheaval and shifting alliances among its neighbors. With its impressive public art, the city may have been asserting its independence and identity at a time of war, mass migration, and turmoil. Although Cacaxtla never became especially powerful, its inhabitants showed, through their art, that it was, says Brittenham, “an ambitious state with a great wealth of imagination claiming to be more cosmopolitan than we have any evidence that it was.”
ARCHAEOLOGY