The Splendid Maya Murals of Bonampak, Mexico, with Prof. Mary Miller

I'm so pleased that you're here this afternoon I'm introducing myself and for those of you who don't know me or know me only as Dean I have been studying the ancient Maya for 40 years and I've been working on the particular project of Bonampak for the past 17 and when finally this past summer the 17 years of research on Bonampak were published in a volume that I have described as a useful doorstop to some of you I was saying to those who were in my office in in SSS that I was looking out and seeing monkeys scampering away across the tops of Kirtland Hall because they had finally escaped from my back it's such a great pleasure to be able to talk to you about this subject because in fact there is nothing I love more than talking about the murals of bonham puck that's an incredible subject and let me just quickly orient you you can follow the red arrow where we will you find both Bonampak and Yasha chil'en places I will be referring to today other arrows point to places in my world that may be more familiar to you from Palenque on the left to Tulum and Koba on the in the upper right hand corner but this is the map and we skip from it onto the paintings of Bonampak and it is these luminous amazing paintings the most extensive complete and extraordinary paintings of the ancient Maya world truly in their completeness the most extraordinary paintings of the ancient new world all together that draw us here today and have drawn me back to this topic time and again you see them painted here inside this small temple painted just at the end of the eighth century and to give you a tiny bit of historical context the ancient Maya living in the rainforest in that map I just showed you thrived throughout the first millennium ad and when we come to this period at the end of the eighth century the beginning of the ninth we're looking at what is typically known among anthropologists as the great classic Maya collapse in a city such as Palenque T called urban park will be abandoned around the Year 800 or shortly thereafter or perhaps shortly before up until that moment we have Anna markable kind of fine-grained his brain history for that period and then afterwards we find that in fact we think of it more in archeological terms periods in eras rather than in days weeks moments Bonaparte has a particular Yale quality to its story and you see it here when you look at Giles Healey 24s a graduate of the chef school who's had spent the Second World War living in the tropical rainforest hoping to make a great discovery he had this idea that he would find a big one at some point that he would make a discovery that would be transforming to the world in 1929 he had been the first person to bring back to the United States or to a European setting a an amount quality of kirari that would be possible to medicalize and it would not be Healy himself although a chemical engineer who would be able to do this but as a scientist in Britain on the eve of the Second World War who would do so nevertheless he had this idea that there were discoveries that could be made and that would transform the world but I also have to add about Healy is that if we think of him in good early twentieth-century terms perhaps the word bounder or CAD come to mind because it turns out that he would Ted off on these rainforests escapades in South America or in Mexico or in Guatemala just in fact when he had a marriage that needed to be taken apart and on the same day that he arrived from Venezuela with this remarkable amount of kirari on the front page of the New York Times his divorce was unfolding on the pages within a nasty reno divorce he made this discovery in 1946 we may think of him and certainly the Mexicans as they characterized this they imagined him as a Yalie who had a silver spoon in his mouth I show you the family junk store from third Avenue a rather legendary place photographed by Berenice Abbott with the exceptional quantity of things that were in the store you can only imagine how different he was from the Hayes and Whitney's of his day when the family store by the way was finally all the contents of it auction doff in 1939 there were two young auctioneers mr. Park and mr. Burnett who bought the entire contents sold them over three days at a sale in Long Island and if there are any art historians in the room you will know that Parke Bernet was the foundational auction house that led eventually to Sotheby's what was in this junk shop was an amazing collection of things and so Giles Healy had grown up around strange and interesting things this is Giles back at Bonampak in 1980 when he visited it for the last time shortly before his death and the only time after 1947 when he had returned there after making the discovery in 1946 it was a kind of discovery that would make the front would make the pages of Life magazine you're drawn to Ricardo Montalban on the cover of it and you hear the notes of The Love Boat in your mind uh Giles Heelys discovery was riveting and when he found himself in 1946 in this remarkable place where he had hired the unnamed Lakhan tone guy named John Moore who's here with him in this life magazine photo when he had when John bore had suddenly come upon these paintings which the Maya who lived in this region themselves did not know when he saw these paintings he knew immediately their import he knew that there had been scraps of paintings found high and dry vaults in Maya buildings he knew that there had been scraps of paintings that had been revealed under archaeological rubble but he knew that there had never been an extraordinary and complete program before so when he got back to the place in 1946 from which you could make what was called a trunk phone call he called the nerve center of Maya studies in the world at that moment he called Washington did not call Mexico City setting up generations of bad blood between Mexican archaeologists and American archaeologists about who owned the intellectual property of this site in fact it was so desperate that there was one Danish archeologist living in Mexico who termed what would become a terrible war between the various archaeological are essentially armed camps Bonampak itis a kind of disease I caught one and poked itis but I will also tell you that my goal has been to develop the vaccine what was so astonishing about these paintings was not only that they were complete they were full of hieroglyphs they were full of individuals they were obviously narrative and figural and exciting to look at you're looking at a dead captive here sprawled across steps with another dead head at his decapitated head his feet but for one thing they showed the Maya in a state of dramatic warfare and there was a widespread belief at mid-century that in fact the maya had been unlike any other civilization in the history of humanity and they had not in fact been party to the kind of self-serving occupations that we find among every civilization in the world and that the maya had in fact been rather than being warlike and interested in themselves in their art had instead devoted themselves to making works of art that were all about pure expressions of time time t IM e not an herb that they were just peaceful time keepers and anyone who is i would say unless you were born after nineteen seventy that would be the first thing if you knew anything about the maya you would know that they were peaceful and so these paintings which showed something else were readily and graphically suddenly seemed to be in contradiction with this notion what is quite striking is that most of the scholarly work that came out at the time of course could not recognize this and the great british scholar Sir Eric Thompson who wrote about the paintings assumed and I will show you battle scenes here that if there are scenes of sacrifice and torture it cannot be that that is what is being represented it is a misperception on our part and if there are people with bleeding hands they must have dipped their hands in red paint he also found it astonishing having been quite certain that there was no reason the Maya would ever represent women in art he found it quite disturbing that there were figures who were obviously women in these works and the most impressive of them all a woman we now know by the lovely name of lady rabbit a lady rabbit of this of this nameless to him individual he said what is she doing here kind of Plain Jane no nonsense club woman of our era oh you feel the 50's are alive and well when you look at Pok all part of the Bonampak disease there were competitive desires to claim the dis ownership of the discovery there was an American draft dodger who had spent a named originally named Herman fry from Staunton Ville Illinois became Carlos Frey perhaps a name adopted by a recent mayoral candidate in New York City as well where a series of terrible tragedies he had come very close to making the same discovery but had not just a few months before there was a great deal of the sense that there had been a lost city curse he had written many many letters home beforehand complaining always to his brother but as you see underlined in the bottom purple what a Babbitt you've become if he would not send him money to help him find the big one everyone thought that finding the big one would be their ticket out in some respects oh did Giles Healy Giles Healy thought he would make a movie about bond and puck was a movie he managed to get his fellow Yalie Vincent Price to be one of the narrator's of but it was a movie that went nowhere on the documentary circuit and in fact Healy ended up returning from Mexico to Los Angeles where he had this healing assistant exotic guy he had this collection of rare cars from very early in the 20th century pre-world War one cars and he used them to Squire the be b-movie Hollywood set around for many years before retiring to Big Sur where he would live next door to Henry Miller Giles Healy an early subscriber to sex and drugs and rock and roll so what do you do about these paintings well the Americans were very interested in them the Mexicans were very interested in both sent teams of copyists because was thought that this is the only way that you can actually study these paintings is by making copies of them you couldn't really the rooms were very narrow is so hard to photograph them it was hard to light them your generators ran out of juice so they decided to have a copyists who would make the this is a life-size replica that's being held here by one by the Mexican copyist I was seen by Agata and these paintings that were half life-size and you get a sense of that Here I am the height as I say of a Maya King five foot three I'm pretty good until Maya King the tallest Maya King ever found as five foot eight and must have been like Abraham Lincoln among in his rather extraordinary stature the paintings have a kind of presence in Mexico that's almost like our image of Washington Crossing the Delaware you don't have to know the lights of painting or ever have seen it in the Met to nevertheless have this strong sense of I know what the bottom pot paintings look like there was a ballet Bonampak it's been on many postage stamps not only this one from 1974 and how amusing actually a couple of years ago when I was in Mexico City to find that this Jeep Jeep they make he call was selling its jeeps using images of the Bonampak murals around the Jeep on the wall it seems like a natural thing to see Bonham Pok as part of advertising and as a very familiar part of Mexico's visual culture it has been claimed it's been claimed in Mexico how do we come then to understand it some of you I know have already walked into the pre-columbian room here just outside us in the gallery today and know Bonampak in a half-scale replica is now on view there one of the rooms so um how do we put the murals back into the rooms and understand them in light of their extremely controlling architectural setting well here's a here's a start and we we realize from the very beginning that one of the challenges is understanding how you even make such a program how do you take a set of ideas and map them so that you are they're consistent in scale and size of figures all throughout three rooms what's what's pretty clear is that at least in the artists mind if not actually physically drawn on the wall for the painting here is not Bonampak but another painting where they've done their best to scrape away most of the guideline you can see a little bit of it so they probably drew the whole thing out on a grid we often look at my art and say oh it's just so convoluted their figures everywhere and yet the strong quality orthogonal quality of the grid underpins this and equally extraordinary is that from room to room the opinions are the exact same recipe over large areas of walls and particularly when we look at these luminous Blues when a Maya looked at this luminous blue one of the first reactions a Maya would have to walk into room one as we will in just a minute would be to say oh my gosh really expensive the same reaction that you might have walking in to say San Marco in Venice of wow there is a lot of gold in here one of those instant senses of someone has invested a great deal in this blue has this same value and the Maya blue was a great invention of the Maya probably somewhere around three or four hundred ad in which they figured out how to fix indigo into a clay that in using a an alkaline process a niche tamal process that's the same one used to turn maize into a wholesome and healthy masa that the making this incredibly powerful blue and in some parts of the murals particularly in room one not only is it this great Maya blue but they've ground into it azurite which comes from the northern deserts near the border with the United States and ground as right into it so that it just sparkles and pops off the wall we can imagine that there are whole troops of assistants who are working alongside the most skilled artists and who are our artists I'm showing you examples in color here of newly discovered wall paintings at the Maya site of Calakmul in Mexico and then a detail of a painting on a Maya painted vase and in fact what you can see here is the way the hands are drawn is very similar it's as the wall painters and vase painters a big question often in Greek art of are who is who but what we see at Bonampak is very much that our painters work in a style of representation of hands and ears and details that is very much what we see in the sculptors at nearby yashi lon so we seemed to have painters who can also be carvers on perhaps vice versa when Giles Healy stepped into the rooms he could see most of the luminous colors because the walls were damp they walls the vaulting had a little bit of a leak mplet where leak could come through keeping the walls moist but as the trees were cut down and the walls were plunged into heat and absolute dryness of the heat of the rainforest dry season day and then the moisture at night of the the paintings completely dried out and it was clear that there was a fairly thick cap of calcification over the top of the paintings the calcification dried and became white it was calcium carbonate that dripped through the vaults over the top of the paintings at the time that the copyists were working the copyist made a great discovery they said look rather than use water to keep these paintings wet let's use kerosene and they'll stay they'll stay moist for a long time both of the copyists working side by side we know were always smoking and painting with kerosene and we also know that one was tippling a lot and just to imagine that the whole thing didn't go up in smoke at the time and of course you feel a certain amount of horror the conservators whom you see on the right made it clear that they now needed to starting around 1960 that it could only be water that would be used on the walls and you all feel off thank god water well here's the story about that water that water came from basically a swamp nearby and was full of living organisms and it turned those walls quickly into a greased green swamp of living things that loved eating calcifications and paint and everything else in the walls you know the good intentions of that are just so appalling kerosene in fact had been prohibiting growth and was a sterile substance unlike the completely polluted water that they were using thus in fact making it ever more difficult to see the paintings so by the mid 1980s dried out most of the living organisms now dead on the walls nevertheless this is what the paintings looked like and so the National Institute of anthropology in Mexico began a campaign using dental some of them electric to clean the paintings and even with the best of intentions of course there is some loss and what we find is that although the paintings have been revealed in all of their the color glory that nevertheless actually seeing much some significant part of the detail that Giles Healy was able to track to see with infrared film which was by the way a controlled material in the nineteen throughout the 40s and 50s so he had very good connections perhaps to OSS in this period he was he had taken photographs with infrared and this gave me and some colleagues the idea that what we needed to do perhaps infrared paintings have been cleaned you could truly see them now you could put a camera right up to them but would it be possible to be able to recuperate so much of the information that was in the infrared and so we using unfortunately the year before digital infrared would have been possible this is actually video infrared where we grabbed each frame by video and then had to transfer it to digital the next year nevertheless we were able to find and see using infrared so much of the final black outline for our painters mapped areas of color and then the most skilled calligraphic line was added at the very end along with much of the writing using every document about Bonampak that had been made between 1946 and the 1990s I hired artists to reconstruct Bunim Park at half scale in that amazing many of you walked past or perhaps walked into the TAT to parlor that was long on Chapel Street on the second floor above it was an artist studio where we were busy reconstructing Bonampak from 1999 to 2003 and it is the fruit of that project that is now on display in the art gallery and I'll be leaning on that reconstruction in many ways as we look at the paintings now and what an amazing project the reconstruction has been to be able to take what we can see and what we can't see in the color and to be able to take all of that information and put it into one powerful visual document you see it here a little bit unfolded you wonder why are all those cutouts imagine that you're looking at the back of the cereal box and you know get rid of those white areas and fold things in so that they're back inside there sharply vaulted spaces and each room is discrete one room from the next it is clear in terms of the narrative that the middle room this chaotic scene of battle that you see is the middle slice here refers to the first event something that happened back in 785 capped by events in 790 and 791 in rooms 1 and 3 let me take you into them now it is a time in 7 97 91 and perhaps for about 20 years before this that Maya art begins to do something that is just extraordinary in the history of world art it steps right through the wall it starts talking right to you it has this amazing self-conscious and somewhat staged equality at it's very very best and it does some interesting pieces right here as you're walking in you walk into room 1 this is what you see in front of you and if you look to your right and your left and you're looking at the edges of the vaults you see these fans and they're flipped yellow and red they are flipped and they're around the text they are the only quotation marks in all of the native new world they're framing the words almost as if telling us to speak them and they take us from a date in 792 a date in 791 they tell us that the last date the last thing they commemorate is the dedication of a house perhaps this very house this building that we are calling a temple or a palace they are referring to very specifically as the house of a particular person as the house of a ruler named Yahoo Chan Wong they also tell us that it was a period of time when there had just been an installation in office of a particular individual and unfortunately the text is gone where his name should be up above the text you see these incredible figures over to the right we see the royal family on the throne they seem to be the royal family and yet here is one of the punch lines of the story and that is that about 25 percent of the texts are just left as blanks these paintings these paintings are not finished they are the very last work at the site you feel this stage enos this self-awareness and also the power of things not finished intentionally or unintentionally some fascinating little text here because in front of the royal family we find that there are bags of valuable things the most extraordinary is the 5 x 8 thousand or here in the vie des amol counting system of chocolate beans so in a time when money truly did grow on trees the chocolate bean was one of the few standards of exchange in the pre-columbian world particularly in Mexico the Spanish after the after the invasion say well one chocolate bean we'll get you one tamale so you know we have a few places where we know mmm how much is a chocolate being worth we know that there was a terrible problem with making fired clay counterfeits of chocolate beans that looked a lot like our coffee bean today so they're they're receiving valuable tribute here and we look at this representation of what seems to be the royal family but with no names written in around them whatsoever and uh two years ago the Mexican archaeologists working at the site had been using a sensing equipment to look for hollows in any part of the building and they discovered that the bench in room 2 was hollow they opened it up they found this tomb inside it it has no inscriptions it is impossible to know at this point exactly who it is but it's a problematic tomb because although there is the lower mandible the head of this individual has been replaced with a pot this is not typically how the Maya they they would they would include the head and so it is it is an interesting problem of have we had some kind of terrible thing befall the ruling family of Bonampak has the king died you will see in room two that there is a great battle in which he claims to be the victor and of course he is it's back in 795 that was five years ago that was a setup that was when everything was going so well they conquered their enemies they smote them they in fact had this plan of building this great new building and celebrating all of their and celebrating their victory with this expensive fancy extravagant display of everything at the top of at the moment of its greatest peak and then something happens perhaps it may be that physical anthropology will tell us a little bit more well we'll stay tuned for that these figures who are standing perhaps in to be understood in front of the Thrain wearing these amazing textiles it does reassure you that it is okay to wear polka dots with plaids and with stripes because we see every marvelous textile design you could possibly imagine woven and tie-dyed and embroidered all on display here of Lords whom my colleague Steve Houston at Brown likes to call them walking tribute bundles perhaps they are paying their taxes paying their tributes we know that at least one of them is named as a messenger a good title for an ambassador or a tribute payer our royal family looks out at them you see them here perhaps by having it back in the vault you can see it a little bit more clearly and then I now draw your attention to what you really see as you walk in when you walk in this room yes this is going on up above but what you really see are these three badly damaged figures right here and this is ancient damage partly under the calcifications this damage and yet the hieroglyphs although a little fragmentary because they were painted last and some of that thick black paint fell off before the calcifications could preserve them nevertheless the hieroglyphs not intentionally damaged but the figures themselves perhaps it tells us who would have damaged them and perhaps it tells us that it is not their names that matter but rather their faces and they may have been perceived to be functionally alive and that they had to have their faces chipped out piece by piece these three figures are dancers and we will see them again in these paintings they are young Lords they all describe themselves as being young Lords prominent in the dynasty and it seems very likely that it's one of these young Lords who's just been named perhaps this one in the middle they're all dancing who has just been named to be the new successor perhaps that is the moment that is on unfolding here in front of us if I speak with some tentativeness it's because we can't have just one simple story for the bottom part paintings there are those who commissioned these paintings those who executed those these paintings and there are stories that seem to be erupting that are not necessarily the stories that they intended to tell we'll see that a little more clearly in room two but it's why there are more than just the stories that were intentionally commissioned here our three dancers stand at the middle so if you again you're imagining yourself walking into room one and by the way now you can see that there's carved lintel over the doorway there's this built-in bench with this fancy step fret design you walk in you see these figures and by the way that height of that doorway it is exactly my height without shoes on so if I'm wearing one of these glamorous costumes I better get down and be reverent as I step into this room and as I step into this room I block all viewing of it there is no source of natural light torches were never used in this space how did they see it you may well ask and it seems it's quite well illuminated first thing in the morning this is morning light is what comes through the doors and as you walk into the room you walk in through this doorway and there were curtain ties here and in fact the Maya had curtain ties on the outside of this building as well it must have been wrapped up like a Christos Christo project because the Maya seem to have been trying to preserve it knowing how that in a world where you get a hundred inches of rain a year that to be able to save paintings against the ravages of time would take active engagement on their part as you walk in through the door you find yourself accompanied out jumping as part of the procession that either goes to the right or the left to the left we have this marvelous musicians and these costumed characters who are about to perform to the right we have individuals named as regional governors here's a huge composite of infra-red that my colleagues and I generated I just want you to see the kind of crisp detail that informs then the same area in color and then to turn it in to the reconstruction as the as this procession of musicians unfolds the Maya are trying to do interesting things in this painting look at our maracas players and you begin to feel that time is almost elapsing in front of you did the Maya who used paper for everything and who loved the idea of time elapsing after all I told you they were thought to have been timekeepers while they were timekeepers but all timekeeping had a purpose were they in fact even able to imagine something like a flip book I say that to you without really without irony because at the time of the Spanish invasion one of the things the Spanish complained about is how people in the new world waste paper all the time our musicians here playing maracas behind them a drummer standing apart from them and turtle shells that are being played with deer antlers this is what the painting looked like in 1963 it's always good to kind of calibrate and see it as painting if we look at our drummer we look at a detail of some of our maraca players they're also said to be singers so they are filling this room was sound and our drummer takes his hands off the skin you feel sound being lifted into the space he's standing still he's sure not moving with that big drum they're all dancing around him very much as we see in 16th century manuscripts made after the Spanish invasion or on Maya pots where music is always going in a circle dancers and musicians always circling round and around often counterclockwise on the other side our regional governors are in these extraordinary expressions of turning around talking to one another when when are we ever going to get our turn Oh howdy as this is excuse me while I light up a cigarette Oh turns out look cigarette posture really yes this is how you this is how you smoke a cigarette of course seiga is the Maya word for a tobacco and the products made of it you hear the word and at the time of the Spanish invasion traders from the Maya region sold big old stogies in bundles of 20 up in Mexico City you tell me one other product that has survived to be counted in the vial counting system I dare you to find one how it is that the product and its sale in twenties has survived so long you step out of room one and this architectural plan is pretty unusual and seems perhaps have been invented to maximize wall space how can I most how can I use wall space to maximize the telling of a story but it also means that we have this kind of control of the viewer you've been in this semi darkened space you step out you step into room two and you are looking into a model where you can see that the built-in bench and you step into this room of battle and my friend Sir Eric Thompson whom I mentioned earlier about the plain-jane Club woman thing he said it's a little raid am i I didn't have war so this must be a little raid but in fact it is one of the great battle paintings in all of all of art history you see this it unfolds across three walls and it includes figures who repeat from place to place figures who straddle particular parts of going from one wall to another figures where in one case a hand reaches out of a scene it doesn't belong in and touches another this violation of the wall the notion that painting is artifice it's easy to look at these paintings and say well it's a documentary photograph the Maya had war we all get that now but in fact it's all about artifice part of the artifice here is time again that is unfolding the battle starts at the far left trumpets or blare trumpets blare we come to this little vignette here in the center where this captive actually seems to fly right out of the scene if you stand in that room he's feet peal in your face and then captives along the bottom edge of the battle scene are trussed up two or three victorious warriors sometimes four or five all ganging up on individuals to strip them of their finery and bring them tie them up and bring them to some their location watching it all up above our ancestor figures ancestors in even the captives of ancestors as though they live on in the stars and if we go back to the color here I will simply say that there's no azurite ground into the blue here but rather carbon to make it dark and potent perhaps dawn perhaps dusk if you sit on the bench you sit on top of the captives you're part of it you're now a victor you sit on someone whose fingernails perhaps had been pulled his lips have been trimmed his fingers pulled out of joint this is where you are you sit on them and if you sit on them you then look back at the door through which you walked you walk through turn around and this is what you see and it's often held up as the greatest of all the walls in the Bonaparte paintings I will say this for it it has a lot of paint on it and it feels exquisitely finished unlike most portions of the paintings there's there's nothing here that's obviously undone in fact there are things that are redone we find that some of the headdresses have two or three different headdresses that were painting as though their gosh tried to get it right or did in fact this victorious warrior earned while the painting was being under was under construction even earned some new trophy that merited some new kind of head representation up above here you see the starry heavens and if you look at far right you see these three designs on the back of a turtle these are the three bright stars that we read as the belt of Orion and which today if you're in the Maya rainforest and your wisdom eye and you say why look at our Ryan they will say yes it's the turtle it's a particular set of constellations on a particular morning and on that morning we can imagine that the Sun is rising and the figures at Bonampak have convened in order to review the captives who are being presented to them again just an example of the crispness of of the infrared I have to keep showing it to you because I so loved the high quality of our amazing line standing atop the steps here and there are seven massive steps at the site of Bonampak where something like this could exactly be taking place standing at the top of the steps looking straight out at you is our king the person who may or may not be dead in this in the in the bench but it is kind of interesting to think about sitting on him and looking up at this wall at the same time it feels right to me yeah how chungmu on who feels who is standing here with all these captives presented to him underneath to the right where I pulled out these figures they are standing apart they're holding out their hands their bodies body postures are extraordinary and if you jump a look at the doorway you suddenly realize that there see people seem to be jumping at the door itself as though it's an interactive place it's a place where the next captive could perhaps be taken I was feeling a little nervous when I stepped through that door because I know the explicit threat that I feel and then if you turn to where you see these two big round designs that's where the cross ties went across in the building stabilizing the vault and subsequently rotted out here there's a largely destroyed figure who is holding the hands of a captive and is pulling out the fingernails and blood is coursing down that captives arm his face has collapsed he may also have lost his teeth and then we read across that top step and these are captives who all their bodies collapse blood is pouring from their hands they look up one of them to the left looks up in a howl scream and then we come to the figure on the top of the stairs and that marvelous diagonal dead captive who draws our attention we'll come back to the dead captive in just a moment but in fact this entire scene is the tableau of one of the Maya glyphs glyphs words glyphs that represent speech this is true writing the word here represented is hoobie which means to throw down but is being shown to us also with some logo graphic elements word picture that are showing how liquid is streaming from the stars liquid like blood which is falling here in this moment it is a tableau let's come back to the captives and this is a pre this is an early photograph a photograph from the 40s in color photograph this is one of the few areas that was well-documented photographically oh it includes interesting things for art historians like Pentimento see people changing where they're where they're going to paint it but look up look down perhaps at our dead captive his body is marked by cuts different places where he has been a cut perhaps before finally succumbing to the loss of his heart blood this is blood which is pouring down right on to the top of the door and what we've all when you can see here is cement that has been used to stabilize the the doorway covering up part of a hieroglyph that was never documented before the cement went in place to stabilize that door this figure on top is one of the most poignant there is blood that is lurking from his fingers his pate is hanging down and back he seems to be alive but partly scalped and we can find him actually this what seems to be the very same figure being taken as a captive off in the battle perhaps this very same individual when we look at him side by side and it characteristic of some other Maya representations as well this is a stealer that's in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art which shows a regional Lord is taking captive and then what's interesting is that that same captive in that same Lord turn up on a monument in the National Museum in Guatemala City from a more major site as though we see oh there's a great food chain here there's a great chain of being captives taken by one sight turn out to be captives presented at another and so that may very well be what's going on here we're seeing captives taken on the in the battle they're being presented keep that thought about who is the ultimate consumer as we walk out the door and into room three as we walk out let me just say that it is actually not easy to see all of the painting if you sit on that bench in fact what your eye encompasses are all those incredibly beautiful naked captives we know in some cases that those who are taken in Maya battle are in fact artists people of great value who can serve in a new capacity in a new city and so it's possible that our captives have been able to make a painting which fulfills every requirement of their captors and yet perhaps they've able been able to put themselves at the center of a story and what nothing could be more dreadful for an artist than to have his hands damaged so we step into room three and in our last few minutes we'll look quickly at it it's a room that has in fact many parts of it are only lightly painted and we have these powerful hot Jaguar solar deities of the middle of the day over I'm presiding over the top of the scene our Maya Lords here are all dressed in solar costumes including sunflowers the idea of the sunflower moving and twisting and look at these dancers costumes that are all designed for these twisting images if we looked in the vault to the upper to the left as we step in we see a royal family again now just women without any man present in the room and to the right we see musicians but no longer the musical band of the beautiful but this time the musical band of a dwarf and others who seem to have some sort of deformation and perhaps wear masks of the sort that I show you here a mask that is out of the deep pest of Mesoamerica as if to show times of creation erupting in this moment of sacrifice the detail and quality of the painting where we find it perfectly preserved is still quite extraordinary with those little stripe stripe stripes of the restorer added in and on the throne it's just women attended by one male servant who are all drawing blood from their tongues they are making personal auto sacrifice just as human sacrifice is going on on the wall in front of them the under painting here shows through the sketch of these lovely voluptuous women the way that it wasn't meant meant to be seen at the time but over the over time we can see how the artist has sketched out their bodies and then painted atop it the royal families on the inside here just as the royal families on the inside wall in room one as if that's where you might put a royal family to preserve them and I show you the three dancers from room one because they have reappeared here in room three and they're the three dancers across the top and this time they're dancing a different kind of dance they're dancing with cart femurs over here on your left and in the center go out into the gallery and you'll see that we have a carved human femur out there here at the right a handprint bloody handprint on a fan and then right here in front of you the pyramid is unfolding we've got so much activity going on you can hardly see but this is the scene right in front of you as you walk into this room is that there is a captive being dragged down off the stairs his head missing where that cement over that area was never photographed before the cement was put up and then there microtext tiny inscriptions right where the air other arrow is and what did these inscriptions say well in fact these inscriptions say and happened in the land of shield Jaguar the king of yashi lon from 26 kilometers away doesn't say about the 26 kilometers in room 1 it says the new King took power under the auspices of the King of yashi lon and in fact in the doorway of room - of that incredible battle scene that - said Oh shows us the king of yashi lon what's he doing here what's his role we don't see him portrayed in the paintings he is never named in these paintings he's named in one sculpture he's named in inscriptions what is his role we see him in fact minor sites around from a round bone and pock not his at his home site but we see him receiving captives he is present he sits on Thrones he sits on benches these captives here in this monument at the Kimball Art Museum are being delivered up to him you see these wonderful expressions of grief and woe they seemed to have and at the end of the day it does seem that part of the mission of Bonampak has been to say at your service King of yahshua on you wanted music you want to sit on that bench we'll provide it to you oh don't mind our little bit of boredom battle these captives they've been taken in front of you they've been taken around you they're being presented to our King in front of you and you are the ultimate consumer and this dance that you see in front of you on these pair on this pyramid all around the empty throne the presentation of more captives it is in fact for you the absent presence it was a little disappointing in a way to me at the end to find that bond and puck is part of someone else's great chain of being but in fact perhaps we all are we all live inside someone else's story and now the Bonampak story can fit inside the larger the larger Russian doll of the Maya story of what is happening around the Year 800 consolidation on the one hand extravagant consumption of resources on the other my gosh all the feathers the Quetzal feathers Oh Quetzal as it turns out only grow two feathers every few years and there are thousands of them in these paintings all of it for one great Lord shield Jaguar yattawan and what we also learn is that he's involved in larger Wars larger battles Arjun narratives in which we are seeing in some ways the extravagant story of the end of the Classic Maya as filled out in these marvelous paintings thank you

Channel: YaleUniversity

Views: 63,896

Keywords: Maya Civilization (Taxonomy Subject), Wall Street, financial crisis, money, stocks, government, banks, financial institutions, reform, OCW, new book, Bonampak (Location), Mexico, Mary Miller, Dean of Yale College

Id: EDudtA1nVa4

Length: 58min 15sec (3495 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 22 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/alllie]

At the Yale Presidential Inauguration Symposia on October 11th 2013, Mary Miller, Dean of Yale College and Sterling Professor of History of Art at Yale University, presented a lecture entitled, "The Splendid Maya Murals of Bonampak, Mexico".

Painted in the last decade of the eighth century in the tropical rainforest of Chiapas, Mexico, and brought to modern attention in 1946, the wall paintings of Bonampak reveal the ancient Maya at the end of their splendor. Using the most complex and luxurious palette of pigments known from prehispanic Mexico, a small group of trained artists rendered the rituals of court rituals, from human sacrifice to the receipt of foreign dignitaries. Dean Miller will discuss both newly commissioned and newly rediscovered photographs as well as recently completed reconstructions as she brings this ancient spectacle to life.

The Murals of Bonampak, Chiapas Mexico

[u/soparamens]

> all but destroyed by previous archeologists

Source? The Murals are alive and well for something that spent 1200 years in the humid jungle.