Romelia M Ism

Matrikel-Nr.: 2048287

Master Altamerikanistik und Ethnologie

The Art Historical Approach to Maya Art and Architecture

Dr. Jennifer von Schwerin

Iconography

The present document constitutes a comparative and contrastive summary of the

theoretical perspective of three studies on Maya iconography.

The first study was written by Kubler about the Maya iconography during the

Classic and the Late Classic period. He tries to establish the subjects and the main types

of Classical Art of the Mayan in the second level of iconographic analysis, according to

Panofsky.

Kubler (1969:2) locates the work of Tatiana Proskouriakoff on classic Maya

sculpture in the first level, because her conclusion proceeds form a history of style

based on motifs, to a history of cultural symptoms as defined by significant changes in

the artists sensibilities, rather than in their choices of subjects. Besides, her point is to

establish definite and significant style characteristics in order to discover the pattern

of changes among the forms depicted in Classic Maya monumental sculpture. Also, she

refrains from commenting on symbolism, and confines her method to the seriation of

selected motifs.

The second level is composed by the theme, which is a specific component of

conventional topic matter having to do with images, stories, and allegories. Also, the

theme is the object of an interpretation aided by literary sources wherever possible.

The meanings, conveyed by cultural symbols interpreted by synthetic intuition

of the historical situation of the work under study constitute the third level.

Kubler presents an inventory of Maya iconography with the principal purpose to

analyze and group a number of commemorative and ritual scenes, because the scenes

have never before been treated comparatively by a systematic examination of their

figural content. In order to determine the figural content, certain principles are followed,

such as for example the consideration of complementary pairs: texts and images,

isolation and clustering, figural allographs, age and change, invariance and disjunction,

comparisons (?) and rituals.

The second document is about the iconography of Maya architectural facades

during the Late Classic Period, written by Linda, Schele.

Schele (1998:479) considers that the Facades of Maya architecture served as a

stage front for ritual and carriers important religious and political symbolism from the

beginnings of public art in the Late Pre-Classic period.

In this study, Schele was concentrated on analyzing the mask programs for the

following reasons: they are the most important and dominant sculptural programs in

diverse forms and the most ancient and widespread of all architectural decoration in

lowland Maya architecture. Also, she clarifies that the inventory displayed is not

exhaustive, but provides an illustrative example of the kind of functions and meanings

that can be documented for the architectural sculpture of the Classic period.

Furthermore, she mentions the two main techniques used in these sculptural programs

which are: plaster modeled over stone armatures and relief mosaic sculpture covered

with a thin layer of plaster.

She describes the different elements that compose the facades and the meaning

transmitted by them. Mountains, cosmic monsters, snakes, grains of maize, sky dragons,

the face of the God Itzamna, flowers, war imagery and cleft among others are examples

of those elements. She concludes that the strategy used by the builders was to construct

analogies of locations and with characteristics of the landscape associated to the

creation and therefore, the architectonic programs functioned to center the world at time

and space of creation. Her conclusion is that the city and the architectural sequences in

it were the earthly manifestation of creation and founding throughout their history. Like

a great cultural fugue, the many different traditions replayed these themes with variation

and changing emphasis.

 The third article deals with the royal auto-sacrifice among the Maya by David

Stuart. This ritual is the most expressive royal ritual and the dominant subject of Maya

Monumental art and Hieroglyphic inscriptions.

The studys focus is on the iconographic variation of the auto-sacrifice (or

bloodletting) theme, the variations are not only visual, but also based on differing

degrees of meaning, the various religious and cosmological concepts of this ritual.

Stuart discusses the abstract representations of blood (dots and drops of blood)

and in the end proposes two types of interpretation: the dots could either be closer to a

naturalistic motif, or they could be rather abstracteded images which encompass certain

meanings and definitions not yet understood. A fundamental key used in this study are

the texts that accompany the iconographic contexts.

An important fact is considered in this study: the inherent consistency and

sophistication of symbolic conventions in the imagery accompanying the text make it

possible to record and transmit elaborate information. Among the Maya, those

conventions were extremely rigid and sharply defined. Thus, the art was very capable of

conveying very specific themes, messages, and statements, almost to the degree of

writing (Stuart, 1984:12). In other words, the iconographic symbolism and the written

form are complementary.

In brief, the works of Stuart and Schele both handled the principles that Kubler

discusses, which are texts and images. They confirm that the latest decipherments of

Maya writing have been facilitated by the observation and the regularity of the associate

iconography, as already proposed by Kubler. Besides, the success of iconographical

methods therefore depends upon the detection of relational and contextual uniformities

among the motifs composing the pictorial themes.