And now we're going to turn to our key image from Mesoamerica,
actually two of them that are Aztec images.
And for that, I'm going to, we're going to be showing you
a guest lecturer I had one time, my colleague and good friend,
Dr. Julia Guernsey, who is an expert on Mesoamerican art,
and here you can see this is one of her books.
She's a prolific author and here's one that she wrote on sculpture,
and she worked on this giant potbelly pots, pottery, but she also is,
knows quite a bit about the Aztecs and has taught classes on the Aztecs,
and has led graduate classes in Mexico City, and teaches classes
on Mexico city, and so she'll be talking about this.
One of the things about UT is this is a very big place
and we have a lot, just in the department of art history,
we have people who specialize in a lot of different kinds of art
and architecture, have sort of different methodologies, so for instance,
I work on Late Medieval, Early Renaissance Italy, and Dr. Guernsey works on
actually the precursor to the Maya and has almost
an Anthropology background.
Other people do ancient Rome, modern Latin American art,
modern African art, there's all sorts of people doing all sorts of things.
We do have, The University of Texas is a very strong series of programs
and scholars in and around Latin America, and that, of course, makes perfect sense,
given that we are right next door to Latin America.
And so, you know, I encourage you to avail yourself.
There is collections and all sorts of interesting things on campus
if this is something that you are interested in.
So today, we end this video section.
I just wanted to point out that there is going to be two of your key images
that will be discussed in this, and one will be the Templo Mayor,
this very large temple dedicated to Gods, that will be described
by Dr. Guernsey, and then the Goddess of Coatlicue, who is shown here
with this wonderful sort of double serpent head here.
She's very fearsome.
And so these will be your key images for this segment.
So let's now turn to Dr. Julia Guernsey.
- So here's what Tenochtitlan would of looked like back in the hay day
of the Aztec period, and you can see they established
a capital in this island, naturally defensible right?
Attached to the mainland by causeways, one of which held an ancient aqueduct
that brought fresh water from the springs to the ancient capitol.
And in fact, when the Spanish arrived in 1519, and they first get a glimpse
of Tenochtitlan, they're just awed and there are a number of
reports by these men, these Spanish conquistadors right,
they were Europeans who traveled broadly who talked about
Tenochtitlan as the most kind of glorious, amazing place
that they'd ever seen.
And they (unintelligible) about the palaces, the aviaries, the zoos,
the cleanliness. (laughs)
- We teach a course together, a UGS class, okay and it's all about
the year 1500, and Dr. Guernsey does the Aztecs and I do Ancient Rome.
And let me just say Ancient Rome or Rome in the year 1500 is a mess,
is a dump, there is malaria everywhere --
- Tenochtitlan is perfect.
- Yes and beautiful. (laughs)
- By comparison.
- There's a subtle dig coming my direction, in case you're wondering.
- Alright so if we turn to yet another map and kind of continue to get
ourselves situated, this is a map that was produced, obviously this
was produced in 1524.
So the Spanish arrived in 1519, they conquer the Aztecs by 1521.
This map is produced shortly after the conquest,
and it shows us another couple of important things about Tenochtitlan.
They're showing you again this kind of, the island capital in the lake,
you can see the causeways that were built that attached to the mainland.
If you can make out on this one, they're showing you that this is
the aqueduct here, can you see the water coming from the fresh water springs
that's Chapultepec Hill now in modern Mexico City,
and then they're showing the sacred precinct of Tenochtitlan,
which is kind of enlarged here.
But it tells us a couple of important things,
one in Ancient Mesoamerican World, these orientations,
orientation to the cardinal directions, north, south, east, west,
was extraordinarily important.
So they're taking care to tell us that,
that this is oriented to the cardinal directions.
Alright, here's another map.
This is from probably about the same time period,
maybe a little bit earlier.
This one done purely by an Indigenous artist.
You can see that the one we just looked at, that had some European
influence in it as well.
This one was done by an Indigenous artist and shows us, again, the same idea.
This is the sacred precinct at the center of the island of Tenochtitlan,
this Temple Mayor complex, and it's bound by this ceremonial-enclosed wall.
And then we see here, at the heart of it, is this twin temple complex.
This was the sacred heart, the most sacred place in all of
Tenochtitlan was this twin temple compound that I'll show you again
at Reconstruction in a moment.
But this map by Indigenous hands tells us a few other things.
It says that there was this Templo Mayor precinct here, this twin temple complex,
and a little bit of it does survive archeologically
It also shows us some of the actors back in the day.
Here are Aztec priests, here is upside down, a warrior.
Then we get this little thing here, which is what we call a skull rack,
and it was a kind of sculptural, they have a sculpture of a skull rack
with carved skulls on it, but there were actual real skull racks
where they put the skulls of victims and things in rituals.
And then this really odd eye-shaped thing here, which is the symbol
for a ballcourt in Mesoamerica, and if we go back,
just really quickly here to the slides and look at the way Tenochtitlan
looks now, here you see this is what's left of the Templo Mayor,
our twin temple compound here.
And recent, relatively recently, in the last 20 years,
excavations have revealed underneath the modern
National Cathedral of Mexico City, an ancient Aztec ballcourt.
So in other words, that map that I showed you with the ballcourt down
at the base of the Templo Mayor basically has been proven to be,
through archeology, to be correct.
And in fact, the cathedral had started to sink a little bit because this is
you know inherently unstable ground because it was built on this ancient
lake bed, and when they went in to try to kind of lift hydraulically
the cathedral and stabilize it, is when they found the ancient
Aztec ballcourt.
So it's fascinating that we can look at these maps from the
sixteenth century, and they actually are fairly realistic map of the space.
Now here's the image that's in your textbook.
It's a reconstruction of this Aztec Templo Mayor, this twin temple complex
that marked the sacred center of the city of Tenochtitlan.
If you look at it, it was this massive pyramidal structure.
What's interesting though is that this was not done in one fell swoop.
What we know that they did is they had seven versions of the Templo
Mayor through time.
The first one they would've built probably in the fourteenth century,
and then they rebuilt it seven times.
So what you're seeing is a reconstruction of what the final seventh version
would have looked like.
Each of the earlier versions, remarkably, is preserved on the inside.
It's almost like Russian nesting dolls.
This is-- we can get at--
through archaeological (inaudible), we have a pretty good sense of what
each of the seven different versions look like.
This is a reconstruction of the final seventh version.
This one was dismantled by the Spanish though.
In fact, a lot of the stone from it was used to build the governmental
buildings and the National Cathedral that you saw surrounding the Zocalo.
If we look here, each of the seven versions, including this final one,
had two temples at the top, these twin temples.
The one on the right was dedicated to the god Huitzilopochtli.
He is the patron god of the Aztecs.
He is the one, that according to their Great Migration myth, brought them
down to Tenochtitlan and told them where to found the capital city
of Tenochtitlan.
Huitzilopochtli is also a god of warfare.
He's a powerful warrior.
He's got solar...associations with the sun.
On the left, is his counterpart, the temple devoted to the god Tlaloc.
Tlaloc is a god of water, rain, agricultural fertility, agricultural
abundance.
So you almost have two sides of the same coin.
We've got the warrior, this kind of warrior prowess, solar god...
and then this god of rain or agricultural fertility on the left.
We've got these twin temples embodying this duality here.
The other thing that we see is this reconstruction here of individuals
performing an act of sacrifice and blood dripping down the steps.
- This is what you've been waiting for.
(laughs)
- I wanted to show you, this is a modern reconstruction by an artist working
today, but if we go back to the sixteenth century map by an indigenous artist,
probably by an Aztec scribe,
we see the same thing: blood dripping down the steps. Not only this temple,
but this little temple over here, and this little alter here as well.
So it's really important to talk about what sacrifice meant for the Aztecs.
That they get sort of a bad rap as these barbaric people
who loved sacrifice, you know, bloody, gory, constantly killing people
and dripping their blood down the steps.
And if you buy into that, you're missing the big point here.
For one, the blood is probably dramatized,
even in this portrayal, even here on this map.
The blood symbolized the ultimate act of piety and sacrifice.
When you wanted to offer the most precious substance
possible to the gods, when you wanted to nurture the gods,
to give back to them, to reciprocate for the riches,
the agricultural riches, the life riches,
you would give back to them the most sacred gift, which was blood.
So we have to understand blood letting in an Aztec worldview,
and really in a Mesoamerican worldview, as the ultimate act of piety.
To have an image and put blood all over the steps as we do here,
isn't meant to convey bloody barbaric acts of sacrifice,
but to say that blood has been offered to the gods,
that they honor their gods appropriately.
And that sacrifice could take a number of different forms.
There was self-sacrifice, you might prick your tongue,
that was a favorite place to let blood, and drop a few drops of blood,
or at times, you could have sacrificed a captive in these ritual pageants
of the state.
The important thing is to understand that when we see images like this,
that this is really-- we're talking about a very pious act,
rather than one that's barbaric.
- That is a great analysis, quick analysis of this Templo Mayor complex.
One of things that I sometimes do in one of my other classes
is contrast this with Christian space, St. Peters, you know,
that little bitty Christian church.
You have to talk about the importance-- this is just in case some of you
are going, "ahh bloody Aztecs".
Those of you who are aware, particularly the Catholic liturgy
is very much about the blood, but any Christian liturgy
is-- you are drinking, eating the body and blood in the Communion,
in the Eucharist of Jesus.
You are doing it every week. I'm a Lapsed Catholic so I can chortle,
I did all the Communion and everything.
We need to be really careful when we judge and think about this.
I think that notion that Dr. Guernsky goes through
with the idea that this is a sacrifice, and it's a way to honor the gods
as best as you can, is very much akin to what we--
that many people do in Christianity.
Just food for thought.
I wanted to show you a couple of examples of Aztec art
both before and after Cortés.
And one is the-- the before is obviously this beautiful headdress,
which is over on the right. And this is-- oh man, is it gorgeous.
I think it's in Vienna, or some place like that, that shouldn't be,
because the Hapsburg's were-- they ruled Europe and they got
a lot of the goodies.
So this painting was part of the Hapsburg Empire.
This headdress, you can see, the colors blue, well blue
is a color that is often associated with royalty,
blue or purple. And in many cultures,
green is also-- it's sort of rare in the natural world.
We can see this is made of-- we have turquoise down here,
and this is-- we know that they were trading with the American Southwest,
we have this gold, which they had to have been trading with South America
because there wasn't any-- or with North America
because there really aren't gold deposits there in Central America.
And then the poor Quetzal bird, and that is a lot of Quetzal feathers
that make up this headdress. Of course, this is not something
that everybody wears, this is just the emperor, emperor Moctezuma.
And they would have aviaries, and they would cultivate
Quetzal birds, and they would drop a feather, and everybody
would probably go, "yay!" and run off with one more feather.
It's glorious. And look, it's old and look how beautiful it still is.
You know sometimes things can, old birds (inaudible),
you know taxidermy birds, they sometimes look a little moppy.
But very very beautiful example here and so they brought these things to--
oh the other thing is, if you ever see a headdress like this, any feather work
and you can see more feather work over here, if there's a
section that's black, those are grackle (laughs).
And you may not familiar be with a quetzal bird because I don't think
I've ever seen one, but we are all familiar with Grackles.
Those-- you know, the male Grackles, you know the ones who strut around,
do nothing, and put their heads up in the air and all the female Grackles
are off doing all the work, raising the babies and doing everything.
But those male Grackles have those you know iridescent, shiny black feathers
and they were very much sought after also, believe it or not. So,
good to know they're useful for something.
But the other thing is when the Spanish came and then of course they
immediately started to proselytize and try to convert everybody
and then they put these artisans to work to make these fabulous
objects that we have here, you know with Virgin Mary in a feather painting
that was then of course sent off to Europe and these were avidly collected
because they were such-- you know they were so extraordinary. I mean it's,
it's almost like a mosaic but made with feathers. You can see here all the
blue and green and everything. I mean this is an extraordinary object also.
So this is before-- pre and post conquest.
There are also, the Aztecs did a lot of trade in a lot of these regions with,
they traded pretty far and wide and they got materials. And again,
not very many of these locally but you can see here this jade object,
piece of jewelry over here on the left, it's jade and gold, so neither of those
really were from right around there so they would have traded these objects.
And jade is also one of those minerals, and there's a couple different kinds of
minerals that actually are jade--
across many cultures, this is a very, you know lots of parts of Asia,
Oceania, jade is very sought after and had these magical properties.
And so this is absolutely a luxury item here.
And then downward this beautiful, beautiful metal work in here.
And then others (inaudible), these two dogs, I love dogs
and they remind me of my two dogs.
That are-- the purple one is amethyst and the orange-ish one is onyx and
these ended up in the Medici Collection in Florence and they're in a
museum in Florence, a mineralogy museum in Florence of all things,
but they are little heads of dogs and dogs sometimes...
I'm certain people had pet dogs but they also would eat dogs
and they would also sacrifice dogs.
But they would also have dogs to keep them warm at night and various things,
so they loved their dogs just maybe in a different way from us.
Okay, in our next session we will be talking about the Inca Empire.