Empire on Display : A $3.5-Million University of Colorado Exhibit Re-Creates Life as It May Have Been When the Aztecs Thrived and Ruled in Mexico

Before Batman, there was Bat God.

While the modern caped crusader is famous for his crime-fighting adventures, no one is really sure why Bat God mesmerized the ancient Aztecs of Mesoamerica.

“The significance of the bat god is still under study,” said University of Colorado Prof. David Carrasco.

“What we do know is that bats and bat symbolism tended to be associated with caves, the underworld and the afterlife.”

A towering statue of the half-man, half-bat deity is one of nearly 300 Aztec artifacts from Mexico on display at the Denver Museum of Natural History through Feb. 21.

“Aztec: The World of Moctezuma,” a $3.5-million exhibition, gives visitors an unusual glimpse of what archeologists believe life was like for the thriving Aztecs when the Spanish conquerors arrived in 1519. Nearly all the artifacts come from two national museums in Mexico City. They include gold and jade jewelry, obsidian weapons and an array of pottery and other everyday items.

The rare treasures have been placed in dioramas, in cultural context. They show all aspects of society: the sophisticated agricultural system, bustling city life and a 16-foot-tall replica of the Templo Mayor--the Great Temple--the Aztecs’ religious center.

“Our thrust with this exhibit is a visual educational experience of looking at the Aztec empire through its artifacts, through its culture,” said Jane Stevenson Day, chief curator at the museum.

Intricate murals provide colorful backdrops, including a crowded scene at a great marketplace. Baskets in this diorama are filled with vegetables molded and hand-painted to closely reflect the fruits and vegetables available during Aztec times.

Artist Stevon Lucero spent more than three months giving each Aztec face a unique look, on mannequins specially made to ensure their stature matched that of the ancient people. Their clothing was made on back-strap looms in Mexico.

The Aztecs are often associated with images of human sacrifice, human skulls as temple displays and bloody combat with their conquerors. But the last indigenous people of the Valley of Mexico also showed a sensitivity in poetry, art and astronomy, said Day.

The Aztecs migrated to the Valley of Mexico in 1193. Over the next 300 years, they built the great city of Tenochtitlan on hundreds of tiny islands in Lake Texcoco, “probably the largest city in the world at the time,” Carrasco said.

Tenochtitlan’s centerpiece was the Templo Mayor, a pyramid crowned by two temples. One was dedicated to the god of war and the sun, the other to the god of rain. They sacrificed humans to gods for a variety of reasons, Carrasco said.

But they also had a colorful language that energized their art. “They talk about a daughter as being a jade necklace that hangs around your neck, this sort of thing, which is such a contrast to the warlike atmosphere that also was part of that culture,” Day said.

Then there is Bat God, a 6-foot terra-cotta sculpture of a human torso with a bat head, fangs and bat claws. The sculpture was found on the southern edge of Mexico City about two years ago in nearly 200 fragments. Day said the sculpture is one of the few known cases of a human portrayed with a bat’s head, hands and feet.