Museums
Aztecs The Royal Academy of Arts, London Through April 11, 2003www.aztecs.org.uk
Of the 350 artifacts of Aztec culture now on display at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the most discomfiting is a two-foot-tall clay statuette of Xipe Totec, the ancient Aztec god of spring. The name translates as "our flayed lord," and the sculpture depicts him dressed in an oddly bobbled tunic—the clay facsimile, it turns out, of a human skin turned inside out. The bobbles represent the globules of fat that lie beneath human skin, a phenomenon that, as the surrounding exhibit makes unflinchingly clear, was entirely familiar to Aztec artists. For certain rituals, Aztec priests donned flayed human skins, complete with the victim's scalp and face, and continued to wear them for 20 days or more, until the rotting garment fell away. Thus new life sprang from the old, and the return of spring—for everyone except one unfortunate soul—was insured. The most comprehensive Aztec exhibition ever mounted provides a riveting portrait of a society obsessed with the natural cycle of life and death—a fiercely refined culture in which nobility and war, scholarship and human sacrifice went hand in severed hand. The Aztec empire flourished from 1325 to 1521; at its peak it stretched from central Mexico to Guatemala. The exhibition includes objects and artwork culled from museums around the world: stone calendars, feathered shields, lavishly illustrated deerskin books, and a gruesome array of ritual knives.
The Aztecs' cultural and spiritual life centered on Templo Mayor, a stone temple that towered above the rest of the ancient capital Tenochtitlán, now beneath modern-day Mexico City. First built in 1325, the temple was expanded six times over the subsequent two centuries, and each new version encased the previous one like a thick skin of stone. Largely dismantled by the Spanish in the 16th century, Templo Mayor—along with many of the artifacts currently on display—was rediscovered in 1978 in the heart of Mexico City. A video sequence early in the exhibition shows a time-lapse computer re-creation, in which, layer by layer, the temple edifice is built into an ever grander structure. The sequence neatly encapsulates the guiding philosophy of the Aztecs: Life thrives only by the grace of the dead.
As the Aztecs well knew, theirs was not the first culture to inhabit the region. The Olmecs, Maya, and Toltecs had all come and gone by A.D. 700. Some of what modern scholars know about those cultures stems from the Aztecs' own fascination with those who came before them. They visited and excavated the ruined cities of their predecessors and assimilated the old gods, calendars, writing, and crafts.
