Since it opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in November, the exhibition Lives of the Gods: divinity in Maya art has struck a chord with visitors, particularly artists. They have been surprised to discover that we now know the names of some of their counterparts who practised more than 1,200 years ago in the lands that are now Guatemala and southern Mexico. Artist signatures are exceedingly rare in ancient American art – that is, the art created in the Western Hemisphere before European colonisation in the 16th century. For a scant few centuries, however, Maya sculptors and painters of the Classic period (AD 250-900) signed their work, giving the only artist names we have from thousands of years of artistic production in the pre-Hispanic Americas.
The works of seven named artists are among the more than 100 objects featured in Lives of the Gods, which is organised with our colleague Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos, an archaeologist from Yale University. The artworks present the Maya gods’ mythical lives and their primordial struggles – confrontations that resulted in the formation of the world and its inhabitants. The topic provided rich opportunities for creative invention, and sculptors, painters, potters, and lapidary artists excelled at creating works of great power, beauty, and, at times, humour. On one vessel, for example, we see the comical antics of the old god Itzamnaaj as he tries to ride a peccary (a wild pig) in pursuit of a runaway.
Thanks to research on Maya glyphs in recent decades, we are now able to assign attributions to specific works in the exhibition labels, recognising artists by name. In the late 1980s, David Stuart, at the time a young epigrapher and now a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin, deciphered the Maya hieroglyph for ‘artist’, itz’aat (‘wise or skilled person’) – the crucial breakthrough needed to identify specific artists. Subsequent studies by others, including the important work of Simon Martin, Mark Van Stone, and especially Stephen Houston, have expanded the corpus of known artists. Houston has identified the names of 17 painters on ceramic vessels, and some 120 sculptors’ names on monumental reliefs such as architectural panels or stelae, the upright stones erected in plazas or on platforms of Maya cities. The first names appear in the 6th century AD, and the tradition ends in the 9th century.
