Now London’s Royal Academy is presenting the most complete picture of Aztec culture ever assembled. More than 380 Aztec treasures–including recent discoveries from the Templo Mayor, along with highlights from collections across the United States and Europe–are on display through April. Called simply “Aztecs,” the exhibit explores the civilization’s society and economy as well as its pantheon of gods, religious rituals and complex calendar. It also includes the largest number of Aztec manuscripts ever gathered in one place, showing how the culture recorded history, legend and philosophy.
“Aztecs” may well be the next “King Tut.” Tipped to popularize Aztec culture in the same way that the 1978 blockbuster exhibit sparked a fascination with ancient Egypt, the show has already sold more than 10,000 advance tickets. It developed out of a friendship between the gallery’s exhibitions secretary, Norman Rosenthal, and former Mexican ambassador Andreas Rozantal, who arranged for academy curators to visit Aztec sites in Mexico and select whatever museum pieces caught their eye. Mexico is hoping the show will help raise its international profile; President Vicente Fox flew to London last week for the opening, where he also met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Queen Elizabeth II in an effort to boost trade ties and attract investment. Fox’s critics are griping about his backing “Aztecs” abroad while cutting domestic arts funding. Yet few international collectors would have loaned their objects if the show were held in Mexico City; Mexican law says that national treasures brought back into the country cannot be removed again.
The exhibit certainly shows pre-Hispanic Mexico in its best light. Eleven themed rooms illustrate a rich and glittering culture. The pillars of the Aztecs’ civilization were the sun, rain and earth that nourished their crops–and war, which supplied them with wealth from tribes they conquered. Each of these elements had its own terrifyingly powerful god. The rain god, for instance, required the sacrifice of a child with two cowlicks in his hair; the sun preferred albinos, considered to be full of light.
For the Aztecs, art was no decorative luxury. Every piece was integral to their religious rituals. The primal power of their sculpture stems from its role in their faith–to mitigate the battle between the opposing forces of life and death, darkness and light, famine and plenty. One highlight of the exhibit’s massive reconstruction of the Templo Mayor is a statue of the Lord of Death in fired clay and stucco. His liver dangles from his bare rib cage, and he stands poised, with sharp nails and greedy grin, to snatch his next victim. In another work from the Templo Mayor, never before seen outside Mexico, the head of a crouching warrior is encased in the beak of an eagle, representing the sun god. It says that those who died in battle were elevated to ride with the sun across the sky.
For all its emphasis on the Aztecs’ accomplishments, the show hardly downplays their brutality. A display of intricate tools used in ritual human sacrifice brings terror to life. The body of a victim, often captured in battle, would be stretched across a carved altar, his breastbone broken so his heart could be easily cut out. The exhibit also exposes the fragile foundations of the Aztec achievement. Ironically, it was the Aztecs’ belief in gods that allowed the Spanish to penetrate Tenochtitlan and destroy it. When explorer Hernando Cortes and his army arrived at the capital city in 1520, Aztec ruler Montezuma welcomed him, believing he was the lost deity Quetzalcoatl, god of learning and the wind.
The mistake led to the Aztecs’ downfall. Cortes’s army took Montezuma captive, imprisoning him until the city surrendered in 1521. A cultural shift took place almost immediately. Stone from the Templo Mayor was used to construct a massive cathedral. The devastated city–by then known as Mexico–was rebuilt by Spanish Renaissance architect Alonso Garcia Bravo. By the 1540s Aztec noblemen whose fathers had been killed in the siege were composing Latin hymns and learning Christian texts.
Still, despite the Spaniards’ best attempts, Aztec culture was never completely destroyed. Talented Aztec artisans, employed by the Catholic conquerors, gave traditional Christian paraphernalia a new twist. A silver and gilt chalice is in fact lined with hummingbird feathers, the Aztecs’ most prized luxury. Today, the central image on Mexico’s flag–an eagle perched on a prickly pear–derives from an Aztec legend claiming that such was the omen that told them where to build the Templo Mayor. And the Aztec genius for giving form to man’s deepest fears endures in this frightening, formidable show.
