Aztecs captivate London

LONDON -- During a grim and rainy season, a virtual trip into a world of sun worshipers, animal gods and human sacrifice is pulling in crowds here and provoking horror and fascination.

“The Aztecs” exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts looks at the flourishing Mexican civilization that fell under the onslaught of the 16th century Spanish conquistadors. With an extraordinary collection of sculpted gods and animals as well as relics, artifacts and manuscripts -- some on display for the first time -- the show is as complete a view as can be seen of this lost world. Norman Rosenthal, the exhibition director, calls it “a minor miracle.”

Felipe Solis Olguin, director of the National Museum of Anthropology, and Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, curator of the National Institute of Anthropology and History, first offered the Mexico City museum’s Aztec collection to the Royal Academy for an exhibition seven years ago, under sponsorship from the Mexican government.

The academy curators and their Mexican colleagues then worked tirelessly to persuade European and American museums and collectors to contribute priceless pieces, producing what Solis Olguin calls “an acknowledgment of the boundless creativity of the Aztec civilization.”

The “miracle” happened and, as Rosenthal says, barring a few pieces too difficult to transport, “you have everything there is to see of the Aztecs. There is virtually nothing left to show.”

A migrant population that spoke the Nahuatl tongue of pre-Colombian tribes in the Mesoamerican basin, the Aztecs had a short but intense life span as a civilization. In three centuries, they adopted and developed the religions and mores of their precursors in the region, founded Tenochtitlan -- today’s Mexico City -- and created a vast and complex empire.

A view of Tenochtitlan as it appeared in the 14th century opens the exhibition. It shows a marvel of urban planning in the swamps around Lake Texcoco, with an intricate system of causeways and canals, massive pyramids and temples, all centered on the focal place of worship and sacrifice: the Templo Mayor or Great Temple.

The Aztecs paid bloodcurdling homage to their gods and never discovered the wheel. Yet they worked out a sophisticated calendar, invented a script and became master craftsmen and builders.

“They don’t have the same kind of lure as the Incas or the Mayas,” said Adrian Locke, curator of the exhibition. “But they happened at that magic moment in history when two cultures collided.”

In the early 16th century, Aztec ruler Montezuma amazed Spanish explorer Hernan Cortes and his army with sumptuous feasts and gifts of finely worked gold and silver. He also horrified them with religious rites of idol worship and human sacrifice.

The exhibition follows the evolution of the Aztecs’ religion, complex social hierarchy and uncompromising reverence for the natural world. Visitors are shown carefully carved deifications of the animal world: sculptures of jaguars, dogs, monkeys, insects and reptiles.

In the belief that gods sacrificed themselves to keep up the cycle of light and life, and to ensure that the sun rose, the seasons turned and seeds bore fruit, the Aztecs gave sacrifices. On display are some of the carved stone altars on which animals and humans were offered to the myriad deities to whom they were in constant debt: virtually every natural phenomena, including gods of rain, wind, sun, life, death, fertility and growth.

“They strike open the wretched Indian’s chest with flint knives and hastily tear out the palpitating heart,” wrote Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a survivor and chronicler of Cortes’ expeditions.

Recent excavations of the Templo Mayor have produced unique exhibits, such as the magnificent terra cotta eagle man with winged arms, clawed legs and vestiges of feathers thought to be none other than the god of the rising sun.

They also brought to light Mictlantecuhtli, god of the dead. This extraordinary terra cotta figure stands open-mouthed with raised claw hands in vigilant expectation. His rib cage is open and his liver, the organ believed to house the human spirit, hangs out.

Important too was Xipetotec, god of goldsmiths, worshiped at the start of the seed-germinating season. He is shown in various postures, squatting or standing, often wearing a bubbled cloak -- the human skin of flayed sacrificial victims, turned inside out.

But Aztecs were not merely barbaric performers of grotesque sacrificial rituals. “People tend to condemn them as an alien culture,” said Locke, who believes instead that they were a principled people of strong beliefs and fear of the unknown.

“I think their work is incredibly refined and captures a sense of feeling of the insignificant nature of men compared to gods, particularly in their representation of animals and anthropomorphism of gods,” he added.

Cortes condemned their idolatry -- anathema to 16th century Roman Catholic Spain -- but admired their artists.

“All things of which Montezuma has ever heard, both on land and in the sea, they have modeled, very realistically, either in gold or silver or in jewels or feather and with such perfection that they seem almost real,” he wrote in 1519.

Gold and silver ornaments made up much of the loot taken back to Spain by Cortes, often to be melted down. Some surviving pieces, which were worn by the aristocracy of the class-conscious Aztec society, are in the exhibit. Most are perfectly formed animals, birds and frogs, worked into pendants, earrings or lip ornaments.

By the end of the 16th century, the Aztec civilization was largely destroyed by disease and Spanish armies, but traces remained. Final exhibits show the collision of Aztec and Christian cultures. One feathered mosaic Christian icon is a carved stone cross bearing not the whole crucified Jesus but body parts as Aztec emblems of sacrifice and regeneration, carved in relief: Christ’s head and wounded hands, a sacrificial knife and drops of blood.

Feathers also adorn an ornate chalice of rock crystal and gold from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The codices, or manuscripts, on show are unique written records of Spanish incursions into the New World. Original Aztec and other pre-Hispanic writings in native hieroglyphics portray legends and calendars in colorful vegetable dyes on animal hides and tree bark. Other writings are Spanish translations of Aztec accounts of their own history, done by missionaries in their efforts to understand the culture they were trying to convert.

They are the crowning touch to the show, written testament to a people whose whole tangible history can be contained in a few rooms of an art gallery but can still amaze today’s virtual explorers.

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‘The Aztecs’

Where: Royal Academy of Arts, London

When: Daily 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. (Fridays until 10 p.m.)

Ends: April 11

Price: $15

Contact: Other Aztec-related events at the academy include lectures, concerts and seminars. Phone 011-44-20-7300-8000 or e-mail events.lectures@royal academy.org.uk. The Web site www.aztecs.org.uk gives information about the exhibition in a historical context.