Mesoamerican Painting: Social Memory on Virtual Display

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Painting traditions in Mesoamerica provide an essential resource for understanding Precolumbian culture and the interplay between audience and content. Murals on public display convey political and religious messages designed to inform the community and visitors from afar. Other forms of mural paintings are more private, conveying esoteric messages for elites. Similar content can be found in the ritual codices, especially the Maya codices and the Borgia Group manuscripts. These painted screenfolds suggest an interchange of elite knowledge about religion, natural history and prognostications for daily life. Local rulers may have been the guardians of Mixtec codices recording information about history, religious rituals, royal lineages and political events dating from Precolumbian times through the 16th century. Colonial period codices of Central Mexico, recognized as a blend of Postconquest and Precolumbian traditions, are a rich repository of information on historical events and religious beliefs designed for a restricted audience of priests and elites. As a broad tradition, Mesomaerican paintings can be seen as an important key to understanding how the message conveyed relates to the intended audience, and how the paintings themselves record the social memory of individual communities.

Other Keywords
Maya • Codices • Mexico • Aztec • Teotihuacan • Mesoamerica • Art • Ritual • Painting • Manuscripts

Geographic Keywords
Mesoamerica

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  • Documents (8)
Documents
  • Audience and Ritual Context Associated with Painted Capstone and Codical Texts from the Northern Maya Lowlands (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabrielle Vail.

    The northern Maya lowlands provide a rich corpus of painted texts associated with the interior and exterior walls of buildings; capstones serving to seal off vaulted chambers, which often contain burials; and painted screenfold books, or codices. In a number of cases, these texts and their associated pictorial component were painted to commemorate—or provide the template for—important rituals. Many of these rituals can be identified based on ethnohistoric sources, including Diego de Landa’s...

  • Considering Form and Meaning in Maya Mural Painting (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Lyall.

    The French sociolinguist Roger Chartier argues that “form produces meaning”: the physical arrangement and presentation of a text will influence a reader’s reception of it (2004). In other words, the process by which a reader assigns a text meaning, consciously or not, depends as much on the material or physical form through which the text was published, distributed and received as on its semantic content (Chartier 2004: 147). Elements such as format, layout, scale, and color give a text status,...

  • Making and Keeping Secret Knowledge at Xultun, Guatemala (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Franco Rossi.

    As repositories for scientific secrets and ritual expertise, the four extant Maya codex books have proven an indispensable source for understanding ancient systems of religion and socio-political thought. But despite the undoubted existence of codex books during the much earlier Late Classic period (600-900 C.E.), the tropical climate’s decay-inducing effect on organic material has thus far prevented their recovery in the archaeological record. In this paper, I discuss the Los Sabios mural at...

  • New Content for New Audiences: The Repainted Pages and Life History of the Codex Vaticanus B (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Elodie Dupey. Jamie Forde.

    In this paper, we discuss the life history and pre-Hispanic modification of the understudied Codex Vaticanus B, commonly attributed to the Borgia group codices. Seven of the manuscript’s 96 pages were covered over with a new white background, composed of different materials than the original, and repainted with several chromatic palettes, likely by different artists. While the manuscript’s structure largely follows that of other Borgia group divinatory almanacs attributed to Nahua peoples from...

  • Painted Media among the Late Classic Maya (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryan Just.

    Although no physical examples of paper books are known from the Late Classic period Maya, scholarly considerations of Maya art have consistently considered this form of painting primary: as the inspiration of—if not the direct source for—representations in other media such as murals, finely slipped pottery, or relief-carved stelae. Due to fundamental differences in scale, form, and content, however, these media more likely played rather distinct social roles. Indeed, existing materials indicate...

  • Representations of the Devil and the Demonic in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Rajagopalan.

    As the influence of the Spanish Inquisition increased in the decades following the Spanish conquest of Mexico, it became increasingly common for indigenous artist-scribes, or tlacuiloque, to substitute pictographic images of pre-Hispanic deities with iconography related to the Christian devil. Drawing on examples from Mesoamerican painted manuscripts and murals produced in the sixteenth-century, this paper explores the nature of those representations. Distinctions occur between representations...

  • Sacred Consumption: Food and Ritual in Aztec Art and Culture (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth (Liz) Moran.

    This paper is about food, its depiction in Aztec art, and its ritual use in Aztec culture. Integral to a society on many levels, food is often a cultural reflection, mirroring what is significant to a particular group. The representation of food and its consumption is prevalent in the surviving artworks created in various media by the Aztecs of Central Mexico in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The symbolic use of food and consumption is also evident in Aztec ritual, another subject...

  • Seasonality in Central Mexican Painted Images of Tlaloc: From Classic to Postclassic (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Milbrath.

    Tlaloc, the rain god of Central Mexico, has different seasonal avatars in painted imagery. Colonial codices document these variants in veintena festivals recorded to help Spanish friars detect survivals of indigenous religion. Rainy season imagery shows Tlaloc associated with maize plants and agricultural fertility. In contrast, imagery of the dry season emphasizes Tlaloc’s mountain aspect, because the rain god withdrew into the mountains to hold back the rainfall. The priests performed mountain...