Beauty Ensnared By Brutality
Beautiful is complicated. Gorgeous sunset skies can be a product of atmospheric pollution. Damaging blizzards were visual poetry to Monet.
As Monet’s snowstorms suggest, the idea of beauty in art comes with drawbacks. For instance, the majestic Elgin Marbles, emblems of democracy, crowned a Greek temple built by a slave-owning culture.
At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, such complexities percolate through the beautiful exhibition called “Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Maya Art.”
The survey of more than 100 objects showcases the museum’s pre-Columbian holdings, and it extends and deepens perspectives on Maya art through the addition of stellar loans from other institutions in the United States, Central America and Europe.
The Maya originated as a civilization around 1500 B.C. in an area covering all or parts of present-day Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. The civilization was led by rulers who sought guidance from, and closely identified with, a pantheon of nature-based deities.
In their elite art, the Maya came up with distinctive architectural and graphic styles, which they put to both secular and religious use during the Classic period (250-900 A.D.) on which the show focuses.
One object that introduces the exhibition, dating from around the eighth century A.D., is a ceramic box, painted with a wraparound narrative depicting a supernatural summit chaired by a cigar-smoking, feline-eared deity-in-chief. Text on the box suggests that the scene is a kind of Creation Day congress, with gods convened to cook up a new world. With features combining human, animal and vegetal, they are a weird-looking and perhaps scary cohort. But seen here, they radiate imaginative esprit, thanks to the wonderful linear style — shivery and filigree-fine — of an eighth-century artist who signed his name.
The Maya concept of the universe was built on dualities found in nature, and the show takes the opposing states of Night and Day as one of its themes. Both are fraught with paradox. As depicted in paintings and sculptures, the Maya sun god, giver of life, is no Apollo. He is a sickly hero beset by violently lightaverse enemies. He has to fight hard just to make it above the horizon every day.
The nocturnal forces he is up against comprise some of this art’s most hellish-looking beings: reptilian carnivores, underworld ghouls. But while darkness is the domain of death, it is also a realm of sensuality and fertility. Tender images speak to this: a painting of the moon goddess, nude, on a cylinder vessel; an earthenware relief of a woman cradling a baby bear like a child.
The show’s final section, “Rulers and Patrons,” shows how the secular and the sacred, beauty and brutality, terrestrial and celestial rule are surreally entangled. Hallucinatory scenes painted on vessels — of a man decapitating himself, of a jaguar set on fire — represent punishing acts of sorcery believed to have been available to rulers who, if not deities themselves, were in operative communion with the divine.
One such potentate, the eighthcentury Maya king Yuknoom Took’ K’awiil, appears on a limestone relief, Stela 51 (731 A.D.), on loan from the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City. He shares a name with the god of lightning (K’awiil), and his regal vestments and props indicate further divine affiliations. But in earthly terms, the proof of his power is embodied in the figure of a prone man who lies, like a footstool, under his feet.
Images in Maya elite political and religious art are, among other things, superbly imagined advertisements for power through intimidation. That intimidation sometimes took the form of human sacrifice: dominion-fortifying public torture and killing, usually of political prisoners.
This reality, once known, brings to the fore the dark and aggressive side of much surviving ancient Maya art, embodied in the man-trampling monarch and other characters. And that aggression complicates perceptions of this art’s astonishing formal and imaginative beauties, and of beauty itself as a saving grace.
In reality, no culture, past or present was, or is, anything like innocent. As a reflection of culture, art too is the opposite of innocent, and the idea of beauty attached to it is always complicated for that reason, a generator of questions as much as a giver of answers.