A Time before Color: Revisiting the Codex Style

Summary

This is an abstract from the "A Celebration and Critical Assessment of "The Maya Scribe and His World" on its Fiftieth Anniversary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In “The Maya Scribe and His World”, Michael D. Coe recognized a “Maya artist of enormous distinction” when analyzing the hand of the painter of the codex-style drinking cup now known as the Metropolitan Vase. This presentation is a reexamination of individual hands in the codex style identified since the landmark Grolier publication, including crucial excavated examples, complicating the clustering of different polychrome styles under this one category. The scenes painted on these vessels, as codified depictions of what would have been widely known historical and mythical narratives, served as bearers of temporal meaning, mnemonics for performance, and symbols of artistic capital as diplomatic gifts. The method of materializing time by painter-scribes on codex-style vessels, as less systematic than their stone working contemporaries, may signal alternate aesthetics of timekeeping The codex-style corpus thus provides a window into different scribal schools’ approaches to bringing a sense of divine time to art and ceremony.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• A Celebration and Critical Assessment of "The Maya Scribe and His World" on its Fiftieth Anniversary   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35714.0