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Ancient to Modern

Mexico is a country immersed in its ancient history, despite the concerted efforts of its European conquerors to obliterate the past. In subjugating these new lands, the Spaniards destroyed the architectural monuments they initially admired and went on to exploit the people who had created them.

At first astounded by the beauty and majesty of Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, the Spanish conquistadors compared it to imaginary castles of chivalric romances. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a soldier in Hernán Cortés’s army, wrote appreciatively about the Spaniards’ first view of Moctezuma’s capital.

During the morning we arrived at a broad Causeway and continued our march towards Iztapalapa, and when we saw so many cities and villages built in the water, and other great towns on dry land and that straight and level causeway going towards Mexico, we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadís, on account of the great towers and cues and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream. (Díaz 1956: 190–91)

The architectural and artistic remnants of the precontact cultures continued to fascinate and repel the Spaniards exploring the New World throughout the nearly three centuries of colonial rule, extending from 1521 until the beginning of Mexico’s War of Independence in 1810. The conquistadors were horrified by the human sacrifices performed by the Aztecs. Hernán Cortés’s first letter to the Spanish crown described this practice as a “most horrid and abominable custom.” Providing more details, he adds,

Whenever they wish to ask something of the idols, in order that their plea may find more acceptance, they take many girls and boys and even adults, and in the presence of the idols they open their chests while they are still alive and take out their hearts and entrails and burn them before the idols, offering the smoke as sacrifice. Some of us have seen this, and they say it is the most terrible and frightful thing they have ever witnessed. (Pagden and Elliott 1986: 35)

Human sacrifice and other customs considered pagan by the Spaniards and the Catholic Church engendered a debate in Spain about what to do with the native peoples of the conquered lands. Finally, it was decided to undertake the conversion of the Indians to the Catholic faith, and to send priests to accomplish this task. The first to arrive in Mexico—a group of twelve, like the apostles—landed in 1524.

As they Christianized Mexico, baptizing hundreds of thousands, the priests were supported by the Spanish conquistadors and recent settlers. These Spaniards received grants of land still occupied by the villages and towns of native Mexicans. The expectation was that the Indians would continue to work the land and pay tribute to the new landowners in exchange for their education in Christianity. Essentially Spain took over Aztec tribute lists, and the Indian population continued to pay tithes to their overlords.

Later the Spanish Catholic church would establish an office of the Inquisition in Mexico to deal with the natives’ ongoing attachment to their old gods. That Holy Office conducted trials against those it considered idolatrous heretics. Anyone accused who did not confess voluntarily to the charges was tortured and sometimes burnt alive at the stake. Ironically, the Spaniards did not consider such public executions a “most horrid and abominable custom.”

The chilling rituals of the sixteenth century on both sides of the cultural divide eventually receded in memory as Spain colonized Mexico. North Americans and Europeans had little idea of what occurred during the several hundred years after the Conquest since they were denied access. Spain effectively closed the country to anyone other than Spaniards. A result of Mexico’s isolation from the rest of the world was that Spain had free rein to hide and even obliterate the country’s pre-Hispanic accomplishments, in particular its architectural monuments and written history.

From the fall of the Aztec Empire in 1521 until approximately 1670, the Spaniards systematically destroyed and buried all the precontact monuments that they could find, as part of their project of Christianizing Mexico (Bernal 1980: 36). In 1531 the bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga, wrote to his Franciscan brethren, “We are much busied with great and constant labor to convert the infidel … five hundred temples razed to the ground, and above twenty thousand idols of the devils they worshipped smashed and burned” (García Icazbalceta 1881: 311; Bernal 1980: 36). Clearly Zumárraga thought that the old and new religions could not coexist peacefully. One had to be destroyed before the other could truly take hold.

In pursuit of Spain’s goal of Christianizing Mexico, Bishop Diego de Landa of the Yucatán became a zealous destroyer of Maya ritual books—the codices that elucidated Maya history, religion, and science. Despite the fact that Spaniards kept meticulous records of their activities, it remains unclear how many of these invaluable cultural documents he succeeded in burning, whether tens, hundreds, or even thousands. Some scholars have compared the resulting loss of knowledge to that caused by the accidental burning of the library of Alexandria in 48 BC, fifteen hundred years earlier. However, Diego de Landa “simultaneously scoured the Yucatecan peninsula looking for stelae from which to draw the history of the ancient kingdom of Mayapan” (Cañizares-Esguerra 2001: 67), clear evidence of the polarized feelings of repulsion and attraction the Spaniards had toward Mexicans and their history. Paradoxically the alphabet that Bishop de Landa constructed would eventually be used by twentieth-century Russian linguist Yuri Knorozov to finally decipher Maya glyphs.

In the early years of the Conquest countless carved monoliths in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, modern-day Mexico City, were broken up for use in building Spanish churches and palaces, or simply buried facedown and hidden away from the populace. Aztec pyramids and temples were covered over and employed as foundations for colonial buildings. Spanish clergy and secular administrators apparently believed in the adage “out of sight out of mind,” and continued to bury clues to pre-Columbian Mexican history until the turn of the nineteenth century. Their principal fear was that the pagan images would continue to be venerated by native peoples, who, in fact, did find ways to keep their ancient beliefs and customs alive.

The destructive animosity towards the country’s pre-Hispanic past began to fade in the last third of the seventeenth century, according to archeologist and historian Ignacio Bernal’s influential History of Mexican Archaeology. At that point Mexican scholars such as Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora first became interested in the country’s archeology and history. A Jesuit scientist, historian, and cartographer, Sigüenza carried out some of the first archeological excavations at the ruins of Teotihuacan, attempting to determine whether the great pyramid contained a tomb within its purported hollow core. He also collected manuscripts and books about the Indians of New Spain.

Part of Sigüenza’s library came from his friend and colleague Juan de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, the son of Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxóchitl. Father and son were direct descendants of the ruling family of Texcoco, one of the states closely allied with the Aztecs. Juan inherited his father’s writings and invaluable collection of early painted codices that depicted the lives, customs, and beliefs of Mexico’s indigenous cultures. These and other painted manuscripts became the focus of increasing interest among European scholars in the succeeding centuries (Bernal 1980: 51).

Sigüenza’s library and archive first inspired and later entrapped the Italian nobleman Lorenzo Boturini Benaducci, who arrived in Mexico in 1736 hoping to research the history of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe at Tepeyac, north of Mexico City. When he learned of Sigüenza’s incomparable collection, he decided to acquire or copy as many painted manuscripts as he could. Unfortunately, he ran afoul of the viceroy in Mexico City, who disapproved of his Virgin of Guadalupe project and of his study of pre-Hispanic Mexican texts. Boturini was accused of entering the country without permission, jailed, and deported to Spain eight years after his arrival in Mexico. The viceroy confiscated and ultimately dispersed Boturini’s library and manuscripts—the Ixtlilxóchitl documents as well as many others—but the knowledge of their existence continued to entice scholars of Mexico’s pre-Columbian past.

As the eighteenth century progressed, scholarly pursuits opened up to a broader segment of the populace. Previously most who made their names in the study of antiquity came from the nobility or the clergy. Ironically, as Adam Sellen has pointed out, some of the earliest collectors of pre-Columbian objects were priests, who had been previously tasked with destroying them (2015: 40–41).

However, with the advent of the egalitarian principles associated with the Enlightenment, the ranks of those researching the ancient world began to expand, soon opening up to tradesmen’s sons, like the art historian Pierre-François Hugues (self-styled Baron d’Hancarville) and the influential archeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann. The careers of these scholars and others like them underscore the power that the thirst for knowledge would hold during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “Intellectual brilliance such as theirs, combined with a lust for social self-improvement, was to be a driving force of Enlightenment culture” (Jenkins 2003: 168).

Although access to knowledge was more egalitarian during the eighteenth century, European opinions and views of other cultures often reflected hierarchical, patronizing, and decidedly ethnocentric thinking. The pronouncements made by Europeans about pre-Columbian Mexican history in particular were demeaning and antagonistic, prompting Mexican scholars to react with anger and defensiveness. Jesuit scholars were particularly active in defending Mexico’s indigenous heritage, even after 1767, when they were expelled from the country by order of King Charles III. Writing from Bologna, Italy, Francisco Javier Clavigero “indignantly denied the charge of Indian inferiority” presented by Enlightenment writers in Europe (Keen 1971: 300). Another indication that Mexican scholars had begun to reframe the narrative of their country’s precontact history is the work of the Jesuit Pedro José Márquez. In 1804 he wrote about the recent archeological finds by José Antonio Alzate, who had excavated at the sites of El Tajín in Veracruz and Xochicalco in Morelos. This was the first extensive treatise on Mexican archeology to be published in Europe.

In 1790 workers discovered an eleven-foot sculpture of the Aztec mother goddess Coatlicue in Mexico City’s central plaza, the Zócalo, which they were re-grading and paving with cobblestones. A few months later they uncovered the twenty-four-ton Aztec Calendar Stone, also called the Sun Stone, lying face down sixteen inches below the plaza’s surface (León y Gama 1792; López Luján 2009). The chronicler Fray Diego Durán described the Calendar Stone as being located, early in the sixteenth century, on the southeast corner of the central plaza, where the daily market was held. Then, Fray Alonso de Montúfar, archbishop of Mexico from 1551 until 1572, ordered the stone buried because he believed it caused violent criminal activity in the area (Durán 1994: 100).

The Spaniards had so successfully obliterated the remnants of precontact cultures over more than 250 years that the grandeur and craftsmanship of the Calendar Stone and Coatlicue carvings were a complete revelation. The discovery offered a surprising window into Mexican antiquity, causing scholars to worry that the enormous works would meet the same fate that other pagan monuments had before them—destruction or burial.

The Calendar Stone was soon mounted on the western wall of the cathedral, piquing the curiosity of scientists and interested bystanders. The Coatlicue monolith was moved to the patio of the Real y Pontificia Universidad de México (Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico), where it prompted a greater range of responses. The figure incorporates many of the features of Aztec iconography and ritual that the Spaniards found so repellant. Her face is composed of two serpent heads. She is dressed in a skirt of intertwined snakes and wears a necklace of human hands and hearts, from which hangs a skull. However, the image of the mother of all Aztec deities was so powerfully evocative to the Indians of Mexico City, even after nearly three centuries, that they laid flowers in front of her. The Catholic Church began to suspect that pagan rituals were being carried out around the monolith, so very soon after the statue’s discovery the administrators of the Pontifical University ordered that the goddess be reinterred.

Hard on the heels of the discovery of the monoliths in the Zócalo of Mexico City came attempts to illustrate the newly rediscovered Mexican archeological monuments and artifacts. Of particular note is the work of Guillermo Dupaix, a native of the duchy of Luxembourg, who was a captain in the dragoon regiment of Mexico. He began a journey of discovery and documentation in 1791, shortly after landing at Veracruz. He examined ruined archeological monuments around Mexico City, describing them and depicting them in pen-and-ink drawings, continuing over a period of more than a dozen years. Initially concentrating on pre-Hispanic monuments located mostly around the city, he eventually ventured much further afield. Later descriptions and drawings recorded the largest and most important pyramidal structures of Teotihuacan: the elaborate bas reliefs of the Feathered Serpent pyramid (Quetzalcoatl) at Xochicalco, about 75 miles southwest of Mexico City; the ancient monuments of Mitla and Tlacolula in Oaxaca; and the amazingly intricate pyramid of El Tajín in Veracruz (López Luján 2015: 45).

Figure 3.1 Coatlicue monolith just behind the Tizoc stone in the patio of the Museo Nacional de México. Photo by William Henry Jackson (Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives).

His accomplishments brought him considerable renown, later eliciting an invitation from the King of Spain to lead the first Royal Antiquary Expedition. In the first decade of the nineteenth century Charles IV of Spain commissioned Dupaix and artist José Luciano Castañeda to “investigate the ancient monuments of the realm” (Kingsborough 1831: vol. 4, 209). On the third expedition in 1807, Dupaix and Castañeda spent several months in Palenque in Chiapas, where they made a thorough examination and study of the ruins. His report and drawings were to be sent to Spain, “but the outbreak of the Mexican revolution [War of Independence] frustrated this design and they remained during those troublous times in the custody of Castañeda, who deposited them in the museum of the city of Mexico” (Rau 1879: 9).

Figure 3.2 Artifacts from Oaxaca drawn by José Luciano Castañeda (Smithsonian Libraries).

At the turn of the nineteenth century Alexander von Humboldt, a Prussian naturalist and explorer, arrived in the country. He was one of the few early scientists not from Spain to be allowed to travel freely in Mexico. He wrote extensively about his journey, describing the landscape, the geology, the flora, the fauna, and the monuments he saw, along with the customs of the people—all new and exotic topics to the rest of the world. Interested in ancient monuments, he prevailed upon the authorities to unearth the statue of Coatlicue in 1803, more than a decade after it had been reburied, so that he could study it and document its features. The published account of his research in Mexico, Vues des cordillères et monuments des peuples indigènes de L’Amérique, had a profound impact on European and North American readers. As American historian Benjamin Keen notes in Aztec Images in Western Thought, “Not only did it greatly increase European interest in Aztec civilization but it raised the study of the subject to a higher scientific level” (Keen 1971: 336). It was the first authoritative writing about Mexico in the Enlightenment tradition, and Europeans immediately became eager to know more about this country that had been closed to them for so long.

The resurgence of interest in the pre-Columbian past, partially the result of the discovery of the buried Aztec monuments and the Dupaix reports, culminated in the founding of Mexico’s Museo Nacional in 1825. This engendered a national effort to gather more artifacts. It would be a slow process since, then as now, most collectors were more interested in acquiring objects than in selling or giving them away. The museum occupied an upper floor of the building that housed the Real y Pontificia Universidad de México—the first university in North America, founded in 1551. The museum had three departments: antiquities, natural history, and industrial products, with displays intended principally to inform and inspire scholars and the university’s students (Acevedo 1995: 179).

In the year of the museum’s founding, an important collection of Aztec stone carvings and other artifacts was removed from Mexico and exported to France by a French collector named Latour Allard. He had purchased the artifacts from Castañeda. As it happened, Tomás Murphy, the first officer of Mexico’s first embassy in Europe, located in London, heard about the removal and proposed sale of the artifacts by Latour Allard and registered vehement objections. He asserted that the collection was not the private property of Castañeda but belonged to the Mexican people. Murphy’s protests had little effect, however, and the collection was sold to the Louvre in 1849 (Fauvet-Berthelot, López Luján, and Guimarães 2007:104–26; Sellen 2015: 70–72).

During the first half of the nineteenth century a number of European artists became interested in Mexican archeology, among them Bavarian-born Maximilien Franck, who arrived in Mexico in 1827 (Franck 1831: 283). He spent two years in the country, enjoying the hospitality of Joel Poinsett, the first United States ambassador to the newly independent republic (Franck 1831: 128). During his stay Franck sketched pre-Columbian artifacts housed in the Museo Nacional and in several important private collections in Mexico City. He completed eighty-one large folio drawings of artifacts, more than half of them illustrating some 360 individual objects then in the collections of the Museo Nacional.¹

In addition to documenting the Museo Nacional’s holdings, Franck illustrated objects in the private collections of the Count of Peñasco; José Luciano Castañeda, who apparently still considered the government’s collection his own; the Marquis de Silva Nevada; and Poinsett. The images are extremely accurate, making the artifacts easily identifiable today. Franck meticulously gave measurements when important or noted that the illustration was life-size.

Figure 3.3 Stone mask and ceramic figurines in the Poinsett Collection drawn by Maximilien Franck (courtesy of the British Museum, London, AM2006, Drg. 128, pg. 21).

The Franck drawings were the first to accurately record the scale and existence of most of these extraordinary objects. Many of the artifacts ultimately became part of the Museo Nacional; however, since the museum regularly exchanged or sold objects to collectors and other institutions between the 1850s and the 1870s, some of the artifacts depicted are now in North American and European collections. The range and accuracy of Franck’s drawings of pre-Columbian objects in Mexico’s private and public collections in the late 1820s provides a basis for tracing the provenance of certain artifacts later acquired by Eugène Boban.

In 1828, the same year Franck was documenting the artifacts in the Museo Nacional, the French priest abbé Henri Barradère discovered Castañeda’s drawings in the fledgling museum. After “delicate negotiations” he obtained permission to take the drawings to Paris, where they were published in 1834 in a “sumptuous edition” (Keen 1971: 313). For most of Europe, Barradère’s publication of these illustrations provided the first glimpse of the art and monuments of pre-Columbian Mexico. It sparked intense interest among French intellectuals.² According to historian Paul N. Edison, “French scholars likened Barradère’s Antiquités mexicaines to a second discovery and conquest of America, one that would right the wrongs of the first conquest by exhuming a dead, but noble civilization. Huge expanses of intellectual territory were suddenly available to European science” (1999: 64).

In 1839 John Lloyd Stephens, a North American lawyer and adventurer, set out to explore southern Mexico and the Yucatan peninsula; the British artist and architect Frederick Catherwood accompanied him. Following in the tradition of Dupaix, Castañeda, and Humboldt, they were eager to illustrate what they found to educate and enlighten a public thirsting for more information about these “lost” worlds. To that end Catherwood had brought along a camera lucida, a device that projects a ghostly image of what the artist sees onto a sheet of paper, producing a template that can be traced. With this equipment he was able to depict with amazing detail and accuracy the ruined cities that he and Stephens encountered. Their explorations were chronicled in a highly successful two-volume work, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, published in 1841.

Stephens and Catherwood’s work was a watershed in the early knowledge and appreciation of Mexico’s precontact past. For the first time a well received and widely circulated publication extolled the majestic achievements of Mexico and Central America’s pre-Columbian inhabitants. Catherwood’s meticulous drawings of buildings and sculptures contrasted greatly with most of what had gone before, providing a richness of detail and accuracy of scale that superseded many of the distortions prevalent in earlier renderings. Additionally, Stephens rejected the diffusionist notions then prevalent among many Europeans, who saw Egyptian and Asian influence throughout pre-Columbian art and architecture. In their publications Stephens and Catherwood clearly stated their opinion that the creators of the ruined cities and temples they had documented were none other than the ancestors of the present-day inhabitants of the region. This opened a new era in the study of pre-Columbian Mexican history. Their descriptions of ruined cities in Chiapas, the Yucatan, and Central America would entice many generations of archeologists, artists, and adventurers to follow in their footsteps.

Although the North American lawyer and the British artist had advanced ideas about the meanings and origins of what they saw, they behaved in the same rapacious way that others later did—helping themselves to what they wanted. Stephens himself pointed out the ease with which he had purchased not only ancient artifacts, but also entire archeological sites, over which he felt he held all rights. “The reader is perhaps curious to know how old cities sell in Central America … I paid 50 dollars for Copan. There never was any difficulty about price. I offered that sum, for which Don Jose Maria thought me only a fool” (1841: 128). Copan is one of the largest and most important Maya sites in Central America and has been almost continuously studied since Stephens purchased it. At the time many people did not appreciate the importance and value of the ruins and artifacts on their property. Stephens had dreams of moving all the important monuments and sculpture from Copan to museums in the United States, but fortunately never managed to accomplish this. Stephens and Catherwood’s purchases and publications were to have unintended consequences. There soon developed a strong trade in looted artifacts. Then as demand outpaced supply, more and more fake artifacts appeared on the scene.

By mid-century Europeans and North Americans were completely in the thrall of Mexico’s ancient cultures. In 1850 the Louvre’s curator Adrien de Longpérier convinced the director of the museum to expand the Louvre’s collections to include the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas. At his urging the museum purchased and exhibited for the first time a collection of ancient American artifacts.

Eugène Boban owned a manuscript copy of Longpérier’s catalog of the exhibition (Leavitt 1886b: 150). The catalog presented countless sculptures in “basalt, jasper, granite, and jade” as well as numerous “terra cotta figures,” including animal and human depictions. There were necklaces, bracelets, and plaques made from a wide range of materials, such as jade, agate, obsidian, and crystal. Household objects included mirrors, needles, and weights (Longpérier 1850). In the years to come Boban would search for and collect many of these same artifact types.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, scholars in Mexico, Europe, and North America had built a solid foundation of knowledge about Mexico’s precontact cultures. Public and private collections were being formed at an unprecedented rate. Scholarly investigation had opened up to people of all backgrounds and classes, and there was a growing business in the sale of ancient artifacts. The increased demand for such objects engendered a corresponding increase in the manufacture of “ancient” artifacts. The stage was set for a man of Eugène Boban’s diverse interests and talents to succeed in this stimulating and promising New World.