JOHN HUBERT CORNYN, National University of Mexico.
13. ART. Pre-Columbian Art.— When Cortes first visited the shores of Mexico in 1519, he was surprised at the skill displayed by the Indian artists, who rapidly drew excellent sketches of his ships, his men, with their cloth ing, their arms and their horses, and forwarded them, by rapid courier service, to Montezuma in Tenochtitlan. This was the first contact of European and Mexican civilizations which was destined, in the near future, to produce the greatest and most characteristic of all the colonial art in the lands under the domination of Spain, during the 16th, 17th and 18th cen turies, an art which is neither native American nor Spanish, but a mingling and blending of both in a way that has made it truly Mexican.
Mexican Indian art before the Spanish Con quest was mechanical, industrial, commercial and graphic. It was pictorial in the sense that all hieroglyphs and pictographs are pictorial; but it had not advanced beyond that stage in which it was still almost altogether a useful art. Mexican paintings, drawings and sculp ture were the handmaidens of religion, com merce, trade, history, geography, literature and science; and so intimately were they all con nected with one another that it is impossible to understand one without comprehending the others. Yet all had their influence upon the new art that sprang from the meeting of the two currents of thought, from the Old World and from the New.
The pre-Columbian inhabitants of Mexico were artistic in varying degrees; and the artis tic sense still shows itself strongly in their descendants. Poets, orators, decorators, mu sicians, literary men, artists, penmen, all bring to their work a depth of feeling, a strong sensitiveness, often a strange vagueness, indica tive of the artistic mind. The untutored, un cultured Mexican peasant produces pottery, artistic in form and decorated in pleasing colors and designs. He readily imitates the furniture imported from the best art centres of Europe and the United States; in many parts of the republic his weaving, his designs on woolen wraps and blankets and his pictorial feather work are the delight of art collectors. This art sense creeps out in the most unexpected places. The rude Indian fiorn the hills sur prises us with the artistic way in which he has arranged the flowers he offers us for a few cents; he delights us with the baskets of his own manufacture on which he has depicted, in a really graphic manner, scenes from the national customs; with figures modeled in clay and painted in natural colors, depicting, in a most vivid manner, local types, customs, dress, trades, occupations, sports and pastimes. Gen
erally the humble, diffident, barefooted, brown faced figure, dressed in wide-cut, cotton panta loons and shirt of the same material, who offers his wares for sale, is their creator; for there is little retail business among the Indian population of Mexico outside the towns and villages. All this points to an artistic past; for the condition of a given race at a given time is the result of its ethnic development.
Indian The most charac teristic of the pre-Columbian Mexican arts was the native feather-work, which called forth the admiration of the art lovers of Europe. The Mexican artists produced wonderful pic tures by matching, with infinite patience and consummate skill, small particles of feathers, which they gummed to a background of woven fabric. An enthusiastic witness, bearing tes timony shortly after the Conquest, says: (the Aztecs) painted in feathers, producing the living colors of nature); and one can well believe this statement; for the untutored, igno rant Mexican Indian still handing down the traditions of his fathers imitates in feather mosaics national scenes, customs, occupations and sports, in so realistic a manner that, at a short distance, his work seems painted.
These feather artists were in all their glory at the time of the Conquest and they continued to flourish in Mexico for almost a century afterward. Their art was known to all the Nahuatl peoples; and centuries before the Norman Conquest of England, the Toltecs had developed it to such an extent that immense pieces of feather draperies representing myth ological and other scenes were used as hang ings with which to cover up completely the walls of certain apartments of the great temple at their capital, Tula, dedicated to Quetzalcoatl, god of the winds. Three different sections of the temple were decorated in this way, in each of which a distinctly different color effect had been produced. Feather tapestries were used as hangings for the palaces of the Aztec emperors and nobles; and they were, competent witnesses assert, the equal of the best woven or painted wall hangings made in Europe dur ing the 16th century. With the boldness born of long practice and acquired skill, Mexican feather artists attempted successfully to produce in feathers the works of the most famous Italian and Spanish artists of the 16th century. The converted Indians apainted* in feather mo saics the favorite saints of the Catholic Church; and their work, which was encour aged by the papal authorities at Rome, became immensely popular in Europe.