AAH 370: The Arts of Ancient Mesoamerica

"The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were the great sorting ground of the arts and civilizations in Western thought.... None of this could have been possible without a philosophical concept of aesthetics. It is precisely the separation of the aesthetic aspect of works of art from their functional, social, and religious aspects that made it possible to see alien arts as nonthreatening and nonheretical.... [T]he aesthetic attitude is detachment for the sake of appreciation. The foreign can now be understood and enjoyed without its having to be the same as one’s own.

"The Western measure of exotic art was, and to a large extent remains, classical art, and especially the art of the Greeks—what in the mid-twentieth century E. H. Gombrich still considered unique and a 'miracle' ('The Miracle of the Greeks'). Idealistic naturalism, characteristic of Greek art, is still therefore the favorite style of the West. Maya sculptures, first brought to Western attention in the late eighteenth century, were immediately fascinating precisely because such 'idealistic naturalism' is their hallmark.

"Because the arts of pre-Columbian America emerged entirely separately from the arts of the Old World, they are crucial to the understanding of the evolution of art and of the roles of naturalism and abstraction. It is clear that naturalism and abstraction are cultural choices and potentially always possible, not steps on a ladder or end points on a scale. Naturalism is neither a specific 'vision' nor a technological skill belonging to a particular stage of culture. It has most to do with the social and political requirements of a given context.

"Every culture has its concept of the beautiful. Frequently that is evident in an idealized or stylized human figure or face, or in elaborate ornament. Both from contexts and from texts we know that the beautiful, the good, and the powerful were often equated with one another. Characteristic of preindustrial arts of states is a high valuation of technical skill, virtuosity of craft, labor, and time intensiveness—the use of stone tools to carve jade and basalt in Mexico, the painstaking textile techniques of the Andes. Evidence also exists that the artist is seen to have a mysterious creative power akin to the supernatural and that some of that power also resides in the work the artist creates.

"The evidence that the Maya focused specifically on the 'aesthetic' as a facet of experience comes from the nature of their art and the inscriptions. Aestheticism among the Maya is generally an aspect of the emphasis on individual rulers and aristocrats. The glorification of individual achievement characterizes much of Maya art, which is concerned with dynastic matters such as accessions and conquest. Rulers are sometimes individualized by portraiture and by inscriptions giving their names, proofs of legitimacy, and exploits. It is this climate of the celebration of individual achievement that appears to be behind the development of individual polity styles in art. Within the short span of Classic Maya art there is a wide variety of regional styles, as each Maya city, like the cities of Renaissance Italy, has its own genres and forms."