Flemish Food Art: An Appreciation

Okay, admit it.  When ambling through collections of European art, you tend to bound past those   Dutch still life paintings.  I know I do.  Admirable though they might be in technique, there seems so little there to grab us (the above example is by Althasar van der Ast).  No figures to relate to, no narrative, no drama.  Worse still, the artists seem interchangeable, which conflicts with our who's-who or auteur approach to museum-going.  Moreover, still life has been written off as a low form of art.  With the exception of Cézanne, no artist who remains widely known today gained fame through painting piles of fruit, and for him, subject matter was far less important than method.  Here I want to offer something of an appreciation of the Dutch still life genre, or at least a contextualization that has made me slow down when crossing those vacant museum rooms.

It all begins after 1600, we are told, during the Golden Age of Dutch culture.  The flower picture on the left is from 1608 (by Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder) and the skull with coins is from 1603 (Jacques de Gheyn the Elder). By this time, the Dutch Republic had been liberated from Spanish rule, and there was a growing middle class eager to invest in art.  Still life paintings were a smash hit and their popularity would last for over a century.  But the emergence of this genre is something of a mystery.   How did still life paintings first appear?  Why then?  Why there?  And what made them so damn popular?

To get at these questions, we need to first expose a myth: Dutch still life paintings did not appear ex nihilo.  They have a history before the 20th century, and that history is important for understanding cross-currents and changing tides in European art.  Here I want to focus on food paintings, leaving aside flowers, books, and other popular subjects.  Food, of course, is often present in representational art, and had been featured in many Renaissance paintings, from Leonardo's Last Supper (1494-8) to Bruegel's The Peasant Wedding (1568).  But food is incidental in most of these works.  The question is, when did food get recognized as a subject in its own right?

One important breakthrough seems to have been Pieter Aertsen's Butcher's Shop with a Flight Into Egypt, painting in 1551, half a century before still life painting officially took off in the low countries.  This painting (above) is nothing short of astonishing.  Aertsen was a Northern Mannerist, and he achieves here what is called a Mannerist inversion, taking a classical biblical scene and exiling it to the background, exalting lowly or incidental objects, by making them the primary subject of the work.  This has been done by others with landscapes, and now Aertsen was doing it with decadent piles of food.  The Flight into Egypt (shown in a detail below) is almost invisible, nestled below a pig's ear.  It's significance is rendered even more trifling by the presence of an equally proportioned genre scene on the right side of the canvas, which features two men and two women, inviting narrative projections from the viewer of domestic life and romance (also below).

Shortly after producing this with Aertson would be producing food paintings without religious pretext.  He specialized in market scenes, which quickly caught on.  These are usually market scenes: butchers, fishmongers, or fruit and vegetable sellers.  Others began to make kitchen scenes as well.  Technically, these are not still life paintings, because they retain important figurative elements, but the foodstuffs dominate, making them important precursors.  The greatest of these painters is perhaps Joachim Beuckelaer, who painted sturdy market women with rolled sleeves, stationed proudly aside mountains of cabbages.

Stylistically, however, there is a gap between the mannerist marvels of the 16th century, and the austere chiaroscuro, which typifies the 17th century genre.  To fill this gap, we need a detour through Italy, or so it seems to me.  Mannerism is colorful, dramatic, and flamboyant.  In both Northern Mannerism and its Italian counterpart, there is an active effort to break from the sedate realism of earlier Renaissance work.  So we must ask how did sedate realism re-enter the still life?  This question, I suggest, is tantamount to answering, how did Mannerism end?  One answer, popular in art history, is that mannerism was killed off, by a murderous painter named Caravaggio.

Caravaggio can be described as an anti-mannerist.  Compare his Supper at Emmaus (above), with the same theme painting by Pontormo (right), a pioneer of mannerism.  Where mannerists exaggerated and elongated bodies, making them almost otherworldly, Caravaggio achieved extreme naturalism, painting recognizable low-status individuals.  Where mannerists eschewed black, and used color to shade (cangiantismo), Caravaggio was a master of what Whistler would later called "nocturne painting": subjects are rendered in extreme darkness, with high-contrast highlights provides by candles or other restricted sources of light.  Where mannerists filled every inch of their canvases, Caravaggio used empty space generously and judiciously.  Mannerist paintings team with activity, and Caravaggio gives us frozen moments.  His paintings are not life-less (far from it), but they present life on the edge, in moments where the stillness of death is also palpably present.

Caravaggio, it must be said, did not invent this new approach to painting on his own.  He was influenced by earlier Lombardy painters, like Moretto da Brescia.  To understand the link between Caravaggio's stylistic innovations and Dutch still life painting, it is helpful to recall a forgotten figure in the Lombardy school, Vincenzo Campi.  Campi was a bridge figure between the excess of mannerism and the sobriety of Lombardy, a remarkable balance, which he achieved in part by adapting a genre of paintings that was more or less unknown in Italy: the market painting.  Influenced by Dutch artists like Beuckelaer (remember him?), Campi's paintings retain the opulent piles of food found in northern Mannerist market scenes, but arrange these more tidily, and he tones down the palette and adds more negative space.  He was creating paintings like this by the 1570s.  The one below is from 1580.

Now enter Caravaggio.  A specialist in biblical and classical scenes, Caravaggio is hardly known as a still-life painter.  But he surely would have seen works like Campi's.  When Caravaggio left the Lombardy region and arrived poor and hungry in Rome, he apprenticed himself to a popular painter, Giuseppe Cesari -- a mannerist with a dark palette.  He began doing hack work for Cesari, which included painting fruit.  Caravaggio's first known solo effort (c. 1591) depicts a boy peeling fruit.  Shortly thereafter, he would paint his magnificent Boy with a Basket of Fruit (1593-4), which features Caravaggio's dough-eyed lover set against a plain dark background cradling a delirious mound of apples, grapes, and other delectables. In 1595-6, he produced something remarkable: a painting showing nothing but a basket of fruit.  Though not the first painting of its kind, this was something truly unusual.  No people were present, no market women or biblical characters.  Nothing but the fruit.  Notice that this basket looks just like the one in the Emmaus painting above, suggesting it might have been a study.

Study or not, Caravaggio did go on to paint other bona fide still life paintings.  The example below, from 1605, shows off his skill.  Here he rivals Aertsen, above, but he has imposed his anti-mannerist approach to great effect.

Carravaggio's style spread quickly through Europe.  He had imitators in Italy, France, and Spain.  In Italy, he influenced the work of a superb artist named Fede Galizia, who began producing compelling still life paintings.  The earliest dated example is from 1602 (below), but it is possible that Galizia was painting such panels before Caravaggio.  In any case, she deserves credit for being an important pioneer of the genre.

Caravaggio's Spanish enthusiasts also began producing still lifes.  The two best followers were Juan Sanchez Cotán and Francisco de Zurbarán.  They both adopted a highly formalized, minimalist approach and can be credited with producing some of the most striking still life paintings ever crafted.  Examples from each appear below.

My interest here, however, is with Caravaggio's followers in the Dutch Republic.  Unlike the Italians and Spanish, the Dutch were Protestant.  More precisely, they were Calvinists.  This presumably added to Caravaggio's appeal.  The Dutch were committed to austerity and restraint--characteristics evident in his paintings.  But Caravaggio also had a lusty side.  His sensuous humanism and his apotheosis of prostitutes and streetwise pretty boys did not align with their values.  Moreover, there was a Calvinist ban on religious subjects, which had been Caravaggio's forté.  Indeed, there were efforts to cut art off from the church.   Meanwhile, new found affluence meant there was a growing class of consumers with disposable income who wanted to invest in art without violating religious strictures.  In this climate, Caravaggio's style had great appeal, but only his still life paintings were safe in terms of subject matter.

Safe, that is, unless one could interpret a fruit bowl as something indulgent.  Here Calvinism exerts an unexpected influence on portrayals of food.  Wealthy patrons needed a way to express the fact that their  lavash life-styles remained in line with teachings of the church.  The solution: paint still lives that include the trappings of wealth (imported foods, expensive service items), while also indicating that such things are fleeting and vain.  Dutch artists began to paint table settings in a style that owed much to the Lombardy school, but with signs of mortality and decay: rotting fruit, meat or fish (which will quickly spoil), crumbling bread, empty dishes, half-full goblets, broken glasses, snuffed out candles, and even insects and skulls.  These "vanitas" paintings achieved a delicate balance between celebrating Dutch prosperity while also acknowledging that true reward is reserved for the hereafter (the detail is from the van der Ast at the start of this post).

All of this, of course, has stage setting for the work that I want to examine.  Let me turn, at last, to a few Dutch still lifes.  To begin with a canonical example, consider this masterpiece by Willem Claeszoon Heda (1634).  The background is a simple gray field with a ray of light, reminiscent of Caravaggio.  The main subject is a dinner table after a feast, replete with many of the aforementioned symbols of impermanence, along with a tipped chalice and a crumpled tablecloth. At the near midpoint of the canvas is a silver "cellar," which is a decorative canister for holding salt, a luxury item.  There is also a plate of half eaten oysters, and a half peeled lemon, whose rind hangs down like a noose on the far right.  Thus, saltiness, bitterness, and tartness are all on display, standing in for culinary abundance (lemons were imported from the Mediterranean), but also serving as metaphors for life's hardships.  These items are common in the genre, and reappear the same iconic consistency as Mary and Jesus in Renaissance art.

Heda's painting is at once decadent and austere.  These two extremes are always in dialectic display in these works, but some artists pushed the balance in one way or the other.  The painting below, by Pieter Claesz (1635) is striking for its minimalism. It mostly consists in a large piece of meat, which, rather than enticing, has the charm of a human skull.

By contest, consider this work by Abraham van Beyeren, which shows a more ostentatious style which became popular later in the 17th century.  The extravagance on display here vaguely recall Mannerism, but the controlled, horizontal formal, and the vanitas symbols make it unmistakably Baroque.

One interesting phenomenon in the world of Dutch still life painting was the inclusion of women.  Though sill greatly outnumbered by men, a number of women painting attained considerable recognition at that time.  I mentioned Rachel Ruysch in an earlier blog (on the Wunderkammer), who was an accomplished flower painter.  Of equal acclaim was Clara Peeters.  The example below is "breakfast" painting, which contrasts with the "banquet" painting we've been looking at.  Peeters liked to depict cheese, and in this stunning example from 1616, she also includes dates, nuts, and pretzels (those coils on the left are not meat).  Unlike the other examples, there are no overt symbols of mortality here, though the grim color scheme and claustrophobic composition hardly make this an homage to hedonism.

Also of note is the knife.  A standard trope in Dutch still life paintings, Petters liked to sign her work by creating an illusionistic engraving on cutting implements.  I like to think of this as a feminist gesture.  Also amenable to that interpretation are the figure cast into this particular knife: a nude woman pouring wine and another holding a cross.  These two figures perfectly capture the dialectic that I have been discussing, but they also say something about the artist.  Peeters may be presenting herself as devout, but also carnal.  An unsurpassed master of the genre, she had a talent for breathing life into inanimate things.  It is hard to view her canvas without feeling the urge to pick up a piece of the dried fruit on offer.

Notice, too, the chip in the table here.  You might think it looks familiar.  A less subtly chipped table appears above in one of Caravaggio's examples.  I don't know who innovated this particular symbol of decay.  It may have Italian origins, but, then again, we have seen that the Italians were also borrowing ideas from the Dutch.  I'm not suggesting that Peeters was looking at Italian paintings.  It's beleived that her teacher was Osias Beert, the elder, a Dutch master.  Here is a graphic example of his craft (note the roll, which also makes a cameo in the example from Peeters).

By way of conclusion, I want to mention that, despite a strong bias against still life painting, the genre has an important place in art history.  I mentioned Cézanne at the outset, but we must also remember that Braque and Picasso made extensive use of the genre in launching cubism, Morandi made a career of it, and pop artists arguably restored something analogous to still life painting when they began to depict ordinary household items.  With this in mind, I end with a Warhol-inflected homage to Heda.

"Better Out Than In": Banksy NY

Banksy, the infamous British graffiti artist, is currently in New York for a self imposed, month long "residency" which is appropriately located on the walls of New York City, free for the public to enjoy if you happen to locate, or stumble upon them.  At each site, a toll free number has been stenciled for you to call and a hear a recording which may or may not have a clue for the where and the what of the following day's graffiti. 

I'd be fibbing a touch if I said I was a diehard Banksy follower, but I have always appreciated and often smiled at his semi-political and cheeky jabs. When a friend and huge fan of Banksy txted me that she had located a Banksy, I went. It was a now-or-never moment because by day's end the piece would likely be gone, or at least significantly altered. I was hardly disappointed. I was tickled by the sudden interest of unknowing passers-by, together with savvy grafitti/art seekers. I am also a big fan of putting art in unlikely places.  It is something like finding an easter egg long after the easter egg hunt- you really don't expect to stumble upon this little treat-, and it feels almost more special.

The best part of my Banksy moment: watching Ollie, a little long haired chihuahua, pee on the Banksy. The non best part: Ollie bit me right after.

 Check out Banksy's local website: wwww.banskyny.com for further updates.

Magritte Is Not a Surrealist

The new Magritte exhibition, opening at the Museum of Modern Art, offers a welcome opportunity to reassess the artist's place in the history of 20th century art.  Magritte was affiliated with the surrealists, and is often regarded as a paradigm exemplar of that movement--perhaps even it most recognizable exemplar.  That, I think, is a mistake.  Magritte comes into contact with surrealism and borrows aspects of the surrealist idiom, but he does not fit the surrealist mold.  Surrealists were concerned with alternate realities and dreams, with turning the ordinary into something bizarre, unstable, and irrational.  Surrealism was an assault on logic, and as escape from rationalism, fueled by an impression that reason had brought the world to war.  In his surrealist manifesto, Andre Breson defines surrealism as "Psychic automatism in its pure state."  He says it concerns "the omnipotence of dream," and he cites Freud as a central inspiration.  Magritte finds inspiration in Freud too, as we will see, but his agenda is very different.

As Michel Foucault observes in his short book on Magritte, Magritte is concerned with the nature of representation.  Foucault is impressed by the Belgian painter's canonical "ceci n'est pas une pipe," which reminds the viewer that pictures are not real.  When looking at a paining, we tend to speak of objects: there's a horse, that's Napoleon, look at the stormy sky.  When we talk that way, we implicitly endorse a mimetic or illusionistic theory of art, according to which art recreates or duplicates reality.  This idea about art's function was called into question by abstraction in the early decades of the twentieth century, but Magritte does something even more radical.  He suggests that even so-called representational art is not a mere copy of the world.  To make this case, he often asks about the relationship between art and language.  Language is widely recognized to be a set of arbitrary signs (the word "pipe" could represent anything).  Magritte draws attention to the possibility that mimetic images are also symbols.  The painting at the top is called The Palace of Curtains III.  Here image and language are directly compared.  We naively think that just one--the word--needs mastery of learned conventions to decode.  We think pictures give us the world more directly.  Magritte invites us to see both as curtains.  

 Curtains also appear in the next painting, called The Empty Mask (above).  Here we have a frame, which houses pictures rather than words.  The lower right contains a curtain (rideau), then we have the sky again above it, and a facade in the lower right.  Most intriguing is the upper right which contains the words "human body" in French, but then, parenthetically, "or forest."  Words can represent anything, recall, but so can pictures.

This point is made more directly and charmingly in Clairvoyance (above).  The title suggests that artist can see the future of the egg.  But the image of an artist faithfully copying an object and producing an image that bears no resemblance reminds us that the meaning of an image may depends on the artists intentions.  Consequently, we cannot read meaning off of a painting.  Meaning is not there to be seen. Pictures are as opaque as words.

Clairvoyance is not Magritte's only painting about the artistic process.  In another Attempting the Impossible, he depicts himself painting a nude woman (his wife, Georgette Berger).  This is clearly a Pygmalion allusion, but with a twist.  As the title indicates, the artist cannot in fact create anything real. The exhibition also includes a photograph taken while Magritte was making this work.  It serves as a reminder that the painter in the painting is no more real than his unfinished model.  They are equally impossible objects.

These paintings show Magritte's abiding concern with the nature of representation and the nature of art--hardly a central concern for most surrealists.   Other examples abound in the show.  One display case contains a palette with sky painting on it, as if the artist's raw material were the world itself, there are also two paintings of eyes, suggesting that artists paint ways of seeing, and a partially colored replica of the Venus de Milo, which may be a further commentary on the process of attempting to render things into reality.

Clouds are a pervasive theme in Magritte's work.  One work disrupts the illusion of painting by breaking a cloudy sky into four framed panels.  Another shows a cloudy sky next to suspended pink bells.  Magritte's interest in bells and music can also be found throughout the show.  Here bells stand in for sky, suggesting the music of the spheres, but also reminding us that sound is invisible.  These bells will never be heard.  This raises the question about whether all pictures contain invisible elements as well.

'

Also on display is The Human Condition, which depicts a painting canvas in front of a landscape; picture becomes indistinguishable from depicted.  Though clearly a comment on mimetic painting, the title also indicates that human beings are trapped in a semiotic web, which we habitually mistake for reality. This reading finds support in a BBC interview (in full here), which Magritte conducted in 1967:

MAGRITTE: The actual tree in the landscape—you can’t see the tree itself. You can see the tree in the painting—right there. But you know the real tree is there behind the painting, because your mind projects it out there in the real landscape. The logic of the painting demands this. You picture it in your mind. And that is also how you see the real world in everyday life: you see the world as being outside yourself, but what you actually experience is a mental representation—(he taps his head)—a mental event, inside, in here.

BBC: I get it now. The painting is a metaphor about how we see. A visual pun...

MAGRITTE: Indeed. Because it’s also a metaphor about how we don’t see. What’s out there— really?

Another intriguing painting is called The Alphabet of Revelations (below).  This one also contains two panels, or rather two halves separated, as Magritte likes to do, by a trompe l'oeil frame.  The use of frames, and especially merely painting frames, reminds us not to mistake painting for reality.  On the right the painting contains four ordinary objects from Magritte's lexicon in stat silhouette, as if to suggest these are important symbols.  The lower portion of that panel contains a trompe l'oeil rip.  The "real world" behind the rip is as black at the painted objects.  The panel on the right contains a tangled wire-like form.  This may be a comment on abstract art, placed here along side recognizable forms as if to say both are fundamentally the same.

Many of Magritte's painting contain cryptic collections of symbols.  Below, I've reproduced the Key of Dreams (left) and the Reckless Sleeper (right).  The form offers another quartet of ordinary objects, each inexplicably mislabeled.  Or are these labels accurate?  Perhaps the words have unconventional meanings in this context, or the pictures are being used as arbitrary signs.  The Reckless Sleeper contains a constellation of symbols embedded in an amorphous stone stella under the night sky.  These include Magritte staples like a bowler hat, an apple, a bird, and a mirror.  The sleeper, is nestled in a wooden box above.  Both these concern the interpretation of dreams (the former suggests this theme by its title, and the later more obviously).  This brings us back to Freud.  But unlike other surrealists, who who saw dreams as phantasmal alternate realities that defy reason and reveal secret desires, Magritte uses dreams as another opportunity to contemplate the nature of representation.  Dream interpretation becomes a special case of an overarching theme: the idea that meaning is never transparently given.  As with dreams, pictures aren't windows with transparent glass that we can simply peer through.

This, I submit, is the crux of Magritte's project.  He wants to raise questions about the nature of representation in art by reminding us that pictures are symbols and thwarting interpretation at every turn.  Where surrealists want to open up the door to other worlds, Magritte tries to close off all worlds, and leave us with symbols and surfaces to contemplate.

It must be added that representation is not the only theme in Magritte's work.  The MoMA exhibition also includes other works that show off Magritte's range and his intelligence as a painter.  For the most part, these other works reinforce my thesis that he is not primarily a surrealist.  Consider, for example, his wonderful Man With a Newspaper (above, left).  One panel shows a man reading at a table, and then three successive panels show his absence.  The first panel is taken from a turn of the century German health manual, according to the Tate website (above, right).  The subsequent panels suggest a narrative.  The man has disappeared, never to return.  Had one of these panels been painted in isolation, we would see it as a mere interior, but here they are conceptualized as pictures of absence, and the repetition suggests the passage of time.  They represent non-existence and duration -- two features that are normally thought to defy depiction.

Another canvas, The Menaced Assassin which MoMA owns, is more overly narrative in content.  It shows a murder scene.  The nude body of the victim is viewed by three identical men peering through the window.  Another man cavalierly plays a phonograph (might he be the killer?).  Two other men (the first appearance of bowler hats in Magritte's oeuvre) lurk behind an entrance way, waiting to to pounce with a cudgel and a net.  These figures are said to be inspired by Louis Feuillade's Fantomas films (see the still from episode 3), and the other elements may derive from true crime magazines or crime fiction.  Indeed, the image might easily be mistaken for an instance of those genres, but the three men outside the window suggest otherwise.  On one reading, this is a picture about viewing art.  Many pictures depict sex or violence, yet we watch casually. The bowler-wearing men (who are also identical) may stand in for Magritte himself, reduplicated and setting a snare.

Magritte's interest in the pornography of viewing can also be found in other works, like the two classics above.  In The Gigantic Days (above, left), we see a clothed man projected onto a nude woman's body who tries to push him away with the futility that some people experience when trying to rid themselves of traumatic memories.  The Rape (above, right) is even less subtle.  Here a woman's face become a nude torso, making viewers complicit in an act of sexualizing objectification.  Like other paintings I've mentioned, these are about viewing, but they are more overtly political.  They push even further and more chillingly on the idea that there is no innocent eye.

I will end with one last image, that is a bit of an outlier in the MoMA show.  Young Girl Eating a Bird is a grizzly image of a female figure biting into a bird, with blood covering her fingers and dripping down her lacy collar.  Behind her stands a tree with other exotic-looking birds, monochrome and improbably poised, like illustrations from a field guide.  One has the impression that each will be consumed one by one.  The girl has a doleful expression as if her feast were a tiresome obligation or mourning right.  This takes on special irony given the picture's subtitle: The Pleasure.  Here at last one might think we have found the surrealist in Magritte: the painting seems to be an essay in bizarre incongruity, an image taken from a nightmare, inexplicable and otherworldly. 

But there is another interpretation more in line with the themes adduced above.  Perhaps the activity of feeding on brightly colored exotic birds is a metaphor for seeing art.  We are encouraged to take pleasure in that aesthetic repast, but it can also be a mechanical activity, foisted on us by the demands of class identity.  Seeing itself can also be a brutal act.  As Magritte teaches, eyes can distort reality; eyes can even rape.  In this image, the violence of seeing may even be part of a subtle revenge plot.  Think of images like the one of the left, from a turn of the century crime magazine, which Magritte might have seen.  The world of things is a hostile place (Magritte's mother committed suicide).  Through paintings, we can regain a kind of control.  Paintings may cut us off from reality, but in doing so, they can also be empowering.  If this reading has any merit, Magritte has not given us a dreamscape here, but rather a further commentary on the function of images.  Where surrealists seek an alternate reality, Magritte keeps us firmly planted in the gallery, drawing attention to the nature of art itself. 

Mayan Murals

For many tourists from the U.S., Mexico is associated with great food, glorious beaches, and melodic mariachi bands.  Less adequately appreciated is the fact the Mexico boasts some of the most extraordinary archeological treasures in the world.  The great Mesoamerican civilizations that thrived there left many stone sculptures, wall reliefs, and architectural monuments behind, including the most impressive pyramids outside of Egypt.  They also produced painting.  Though highly vulnerable to the ravages of time, some of these paintings survive, in various states of disrepair.  The most impressive are the wall murals of Bonampak.  On a recent trip, I was lucky to see these first hand, and I can say that no encounter with art has been more thrilling.

Mexico's pyramids do attract some tourists from around the world.  Most frequented are probably the extraordinary ruins of Teotihuacan, outside of Mexico City.  The pyramids there (see above), built by a mysterious civilization that thrived between the second century BCE and the 4th century CE, are as grand as the pyramids in Egypt.  Standing atop the Sun Temple there was more moving for me than seeing the acropolis in Athens.  No landmark can better reveal the grandeur of ancient civilizations.  The area surrounding Teotihuacan was once a thriving city, larger than almost any other in the world.  Then, for unknown reasons, the civilization came to an end.  Its remnants were discovered a millennium later by the Aztecs (14th to 16th century), who appropriated elements of Teotihuacan religion and architecture, building their own pyramids in the heart of what would become Mexico's capital.

Mesoamerica's most enduring civilization was the Maya (about 2000 BCE to 1100 CE).  They were also prodigious builders, and their pyramids are among the most beautiful in the world.  The most popular for tourists is a step pyramid called El Castillo, or the Temple of Kukulkan, at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan (above).  It is a pristine and impressive site, which I visited along with other Yucatan ruins, a few years ago.  It shows off Mayan architecture at its peak (so to speak), with a grand stairwell that whose flanking sides look like who serpents bodies, which culminate in carved stone heads.

Though bowled over by the Yucan sites, I was hardly prepared for my recent trip to the southern state of Chiapas, which swelters under a tropical jungle.  Here between the dense trees are some of the finest remnants from the Mayan culture.  Most renowned are the grand ruins of Palenque (above), which thrived from about 226 BCE to 1123 CE.  Replete with pyramids, temples, and an imposing palace crowned by a lofty tower, Palenque is a marvel to explore.  Its harmonious integration with the surrounding nature distinguishes it from Chichen Itza, an brings to mind the great Incan ruins of Peru.

Palenque is not as touristy as Chichen Itza, but it is still a developed site, and its boulevards are lined by local vendors trying to sell their wares.  Considerably more isolated are the ruins of Yaxchilan.  To get there one has to drive a couple hours from Palenque and travel 20 minutes on a small boat (above).  Then, an unpaved path though the consuming forest leads to an impressive complex of buildings.  At the center is a grand stairway, taller than any pyramid I've climbed, peaked by a rectangular temple with a gridded stone top (below).  Of all the ruins I've seen, none gives a better sense of discovery than Yaxchilin.  One can imagine the excitement of finding this ancient capital nestled deep behind the wall of vegetation that lines the brown waters of the Usamacinta river, which flows along Guatemalan border.

Yaxchilin thrived for hundreds of years, waring with enemies and winning victories until it fell at the turn on the 9th century.  One of its conquests was Bonampak, a site some 30 minutes drive from the Usamacinta shore.  Bonampak was under control from Yaxchitlin from about 600 CE until both cities came to an unexplained end two hundred years later.  Though much smaller and less sprawling, the ruins at Bonampak are a fine example of Maya architecture during the classical period (below).

Bonampak was unknown to non-Mayans until 1946.  American and British explorers were then led to the site by local guides, and they were astonished to find three small chambers (above on the far right ) with richly colored paintings (below), created in fresco, filling the triangular walls.  At that time, these were coated by a nearly opaque layer of calcite.  Early visitors used kerosene to help reveal the images, causing irreparable damage.  In the decades that followed, less harmful techniques were used to reveal the paintings that had been hidden for centuries.  Now the humid jungle air is taking its toll.  These paintings may eventually flake away, and many of them are already difficult to make out.  Conservation work has been pursued by archeologist Mary Ellen Miller at Yale, whose team produced rich reconstructions, revealing many details no longer discernible to the naked eye.

Still, seeing these decaying murals is about as impressive an experience as one can have with art.  The chambers are nestled in the white stone surface atop a wide and imposing stairway, which rises up from an expansive plaza leveling the forest green.  Nothing in this austere backdrop can prepare you for the discovery within.  In my experience, it compares only Giotto's Arena chapel and the finer tombs in Egypt's Valley of the Kings.

The murals were commissioned by Bonampak's leader, Chan Muwan, who was appointed by the authorities in Yaxchitlin around in 790 CE.  That's probably him in the left, with jaguar boots and a menacing spear.  Chan Muwan commissioned painters to create scenes honoring his heir and celebrating his military prowess.

The first chamber shows various nobles, dignitaries, and musicians gathering to pay tribute Chan Muwan's young son, and perhaps also to consecrate the building site. Here, and throughout, there are processions showing lavishly adorned figures, playing maracas, blowing horns, or dressed in fine garments with with elaborate headdresses, as in the images below.  There are some 200 figures in all.

Many of the finer details are difficult to make out, because of the decaying paint, the dim lighting, and the overwhelming opulence of the surrounding scenes.  Mary Miller's conservation team has done much to reveal what these figures originally looked like, and the results are often astonishing.  The picture below can be instructively compared to a reconstruction printed in a 1996 Scientific American article by Miller, reproduced below my snapshot.  The restoration reveals four figures with dazzling animal masks, one of whom has enormous crab claws, hovering dynamically above a seated nobleman.

 

The second chamber shows great battles with enemies being conquered and tortured.  On the back wall, above the entranceway, we find the gorgeously twisted corpse of a defeated warrior.  Beside him, another figure begs for mercy, and a third, with a feathered hat, has had his fingernails torn out.  He turns inward to watch the blood flowing from his hands.

On the main wall, an enormous battle rages, which is, unfortunately, in a bad state of disrepair.  We also see a warrior (Chan Muwan?) taking an enemy by the hair, while tormenting him with a spear.  Hair pulling is a common motif for displaying conquest in Mayan art, but the curling anatomy of the victim is more expressive and naturalistic than what can be found at other sites.  This is the high-water mark for Mayan graphic arts, and it stands up to the best work in any cultural tradition.

The third chamber shows dancers and other celebrants, honoring the young heir again.  In an elevated triangular region, one can see a person holding a your child (presumably the heir) below a platform on which a group of woman piecing their own tongues (below).

This is not the only act of self-directed violence on display. There is a beautifully painted pair of warriors, in opulent regalia, one of who may be piercing his own genitals.  These acts of bloodletting are presumably ceremonial, and are presented here in a positive light, contrasting with the horrific warfare in the preceding room.

Curiously, the third chamber also includes a row of elegantly rendered seated figures whose faces have been carved out from the plaster walls.  These figures are modestly dressed, but have decorative and distinctive head wraps, indicating that they might be nobility from neighboring areas.  The defacing (quite literally) of images was common in Mesoamerica and among other civilizations of the past, including ancient Egypt.  It continues to occur today when images of deposed leaders are destroyed by angry mobs or new regimes.  Perhaps these sightless faces provide a clue about the fall of Bonampak.

We don't know how Bonampak fell, but we do know the end came shortly after these painting were created.  Indeed, some elements remain unfinished, including panels that would have contained names identifying depicted individuals.  All this suggests a sudden demise.  The Maya had the only written language in Mesoamerica, and inscriptions here tell us something about the creators of this extraordinary site, but many more questions remain unanswered.  Fortunately, the pictures can speak to us without captions.  Centuries before Giotto, these unknown Mayan artists were creating compositionally complex, radiantly colored, evocatively posed, engagingly narrative, monolithic figure paintings that rival the greatest masterpieces of Europe.  We think of pre-Columbian civilizations as great builders and carvers.  Bonampak shows that the Maya were among history's greatest painters as well.