Outline _of_ Mexican
Popular Arts and Crafts
_By_ KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
Upon the occasion of the
Traveling Mexican Popular
Arts Exposition in the United
States of North America, under
the auspices of the Ministry of
Industry, Commerce and Labor
of Mexico, Don Xavier Guerrero,
being the Art Director, has
caused this book to be published.
It contains a study by Miss
Katherine Anne Porter, of the
Popular Arts and Crafts of
Mexico.
Cover design by Xav. Gro.
Photographs from the collection of
Roberto A. Turnbull
Copyright, 1922, by S. I. C. y T.
Acknowledgment
My search for the sources and meanings of Mexican folk art has been a
richly rewarded adventure among intelligences and devotions. Artists
and scientists who have given many years to the work of recreating
ancient Mexico from her historical remains, students who have brought
enthusiasms as fresh and recent as my own, all have generously given
me aid and counsel, have been swift to remove barriers of race and
language and tradition that lay between me and the Mexican.
To avoid an accumulation of footnotes in the text, let me here set
down that I have read such widely divergent historians as Prescott,
Alexander von Humboldt, Bandolier, Madame Calderon de la Barca,
Bancroft, Rivas Palacio, Reville, Nicolas Leon; such entirely opposing
contemporaneous writers as Dr. Atl, authority on modern popular arts in
Mexico; Licenciado Ramon Mena, whose studies of recent archeological
excavations have been of much value; and Don Manuel Gamio, whose
theories of ethnology are sound and of deep interest.
Thanks to the initiative and energy of Don Miguel Alessio Robles,
Minister of Commerce and Industry, the actual work of preparing this
exposition has been accomplished, with the personal collaboration of
his department.
For invaluable aid in gathering, classifying and interpreting the
materials for this outline, I am happy to express my gratitude to
Licenciado Jose Vasconcelos, Minister of Education and Fine Arts; to
Licenciado Vincente Lombardo Toledano, director of the Preparatory
School of the National University; to Señor Jorge Enciso, of the
National Museum, collector and restorer of examples of early Colonial
art, connoisseur of Mexican jade and Aztec design; to Licenciado Ramon
Mena and his associate Mr. William Niven, the indefatigable digger who
has brought out of the earth an extraordinary volume of relics from
buried cities.
The group of men immediately concerned in organizing this Exposition
have been especially generous with their aid, Señor Alfonso Caso,
private secretary to the Minister of Commerce and Industry; Dr. J. H.
Retinger; and the Mexican painters, Diego Rivera, Adolfo Best-Maugard,
and Xavier Guerrero, all have contributed the fruits of their studies
to my understanding of Mexican art, have helped me to form my point of
view and to place my sympathies.
This simple outline of a profound subject is offered as an introduction
to the arts of the Mexican people, on the occasion when they are
sending for the first time an exhibition of their work to a foreign
country. Virtually no special preparations were made for this exhibit
in the way of manufacturing wares. The examples shown here were
gathered from the little country villages, from the common shops and
street markets, where the native brings his goods to sell them to his
own people. They are personal, authentic creations, by the peasant
craftsmen of a race that expresses itself simply and inevitably in
terms of beauty.
THE AUTHOR.
_Mexico, D. F., May, Nineteen Hundred Twenty-two._
[Illustration: _Decorated Jar--Tonalá, Jalisco_]
PART I: _Pre-Hispanic_
It is a unique truth that to trace the origin of Mexican popular art as
it exists today, it is necessary to consult first the archaeologists
and scientists. In this country the past is interwoven visibly with
the present, living and potent. The latter day life of the native is
an anachronism. To account for him, archaeology and ethnology must
combine in what appears to be an ill-rewarded search for beginnings. It
is not possible to settle the question of the ancient races of Mexico,
to close the book and pronounce clearly on a dead civilization, as in
other countries where the earth is giving up her entombed cities.
The descendants of the early Mexicans have survived the buried temples
of their culture and are here, almost pure in strain, spiritually
remote, stubbornly individual after centuries of alien domination.
They have given way before foreign conquest with reservations. They
outwardly conformed to a religion imposed upon them, and mingled
ancient significances with its new rituals.
They patiently wrought in the arts after the design of the strangers,
and continued thereby an almost unbroken record of their own racial
soul. Here is an art, almost unknown in the world today, a survival
from internal wars, conquests, many fusions; an actual thing of full
breathing vitality and meaning. Always the foreign influences have
been assimilated and transformed slowly into something incorruptibly
Mexican, personal to the race.
The first concern of the scientist is to discover the origin, the first
impulse of the artist is to apprehend the spirit. If the artist has
more nearly achieved his aim, it is maybe because his task is simpler.
He perceives and accepts the fundamental kinship of all human beings on
the plane of natural emotion.
They are agreed in this essential: the problem of the native is the
problem of Mexico today. His future is invaluable, and must be secured.
Modern sentiment of humanity and economic wisdom alike declare that the
Indio has in the life of today his rights, his uses and his destiny.
For this it is necessary to arrive at an understanding of him. The one
approach to such an eventuality is by way of comprehending first his
contribution to society ... and his contribution is beauty. A strange
thing, sufficiently marvelous, of miraculous import. While we are
attempting to explain him, he fulfills himself in his desert silences,
unaware that he is enigma.
Scientific theory regarding the origin of the Mexican is at once
less sure and more dogmatic than the artistic. One may say with all
high regard to the devoted and serious research of the students
and historians of Mexico, that each man has an individual theory,
compounded of many fallible ingredients. He is committed to faith in
his works with an intensity once the property of religious fanaticism.
This Sphynx of countries, which for every fragment of authentic
history yields two riddles, is an enormous field of travail for the
enthusiast who will die in defense of his facts. Each of them proves
his contention by his own illumined faith, defended by his carefully
gathered and rigidly arranged group of theories beginning where all
theories of origins must begin: on hypothesis.
This lends to their conclusions that quality of fantasy, of speculation
and myth creativeness that has always marked the ideas of man pitiably
eager to explain himself to himself, to open eternity with the key of
his human imagination. But their work has this permanent value: they
have brought out of the earth records in stone, unaccountable things in
the main, but lasting documents for further study.
A certain student will tell you there were five successive
civilizations in Mexico; it is true he has collected five curiously
unrelated types of masks and faces modelled in clay from several cities
and from varying depths. The doubter may go to these cities and dig
them out for himself.
Another declares, and will show you charts to make it clear, that only
two distinct types of culture existed here: the Maya and the Nahoa,
so-called. Still others maintain that the races of ancient Mexico
derived from the Chinese in the very dawn of time, and would raise the
Atlantis to make a footpath for the migratory tribes across the sea.
This last body of believers is almost large enough to found a school of
archeology and ethnology of its own.
They point to slant eyes, to anatomical character, to a gold colored
skin surviving in the several tribes, in the Otomis, in the Mixtecas,
in the early Maya. In effect, their contention is based on religious
faith; it is not possible that in old time there were rival gods, each
creating after his own fashion. The obscure monotheism in the soul of
modern man declares the early man in the valley of Anahuac must be in
some way blood brother to the human beings cradled in Mother Asia.
They seek to account for this common Asiatic origin by comparison of
hieroglyphics, motifs of design, by feature and customs and dress. They
restore that vanished pathway of islands across the sea, which, if they
did not form a complete bridge, created channels narrow enough for
peoples to navigate them in small boats. This was, they admit, in the
dawn; if they came so early as that, their kinship with the east is a
remote thing, a mere sharing of common humanity.
Analogies founded on comparisons so general have proved misleading.
Those individuals who have studied origins in Egypt first find in the
Mexican culture startling resemblances to the architecture and art
motifs of the Early Egyptians. Scientists declare that virtually every
culture of ancient Europe and Asia reveal some circuitous kinship with
the inhabitants of Mexico.
These resemblances appertain to the humanity of all races. The fixed
dates of the Mexican culture vary from the Glacial epoch of the
extremists to the five centuries B. C. of the conservatives. Science
is hopelessly divided in point of time; but whatever the period of
their emergence into civilization, they followed the natural process of
growth. They may have been parallel with the same development in Europe
and Asia, or they may have progressed in a slower rhythm, governed by
different climatic conditions and their insurmountable isolation from
the rest of the world.
In important details they differ entirely. These differences give
significance and depth to their culture. The resemblances are casual.
A study of early design, for example, shows us that circles and wavy
lines, labyrinths, swastikas and angles existed as basic motives among
those peoples whom we are accustomed to call primitive. I submit that
they existed as the simple universal expressions of emotions and
perceptions that animated the awakening soul of man, the natural idiom
of primary understanding. The individual use of these perceptions were
developed differently by the growth of human personality limited and
directed by its environment.
A child of today, fragrant of civilization that he is, yet sees his
world first with the eyes of innocence. He draws by instinct a straight
line. A wavy line is water, a round circle serves variously to express
his feelings for a flower, a head, a moon. He draws these things
because they are the first planes and outlines the human eye apprehends.
In his terrors the child is primitive man. He fears flood, fire,
lightning, the mysterious and awful portents of nature. He creates
superstitions about his birth, his emotions, his sex. I submit that
these instinctive gropings make all men akin, and that they derive from
within the individual. A race in China and a race in Mexico, emerging
into the adolescence of civilization, would do similar things because
those are the things all the men in the world did in the beginning.
Since conclusions as to the history of the early races of Mexico
must be based on choice of sources of information guided by personal
faith and judgment, I have contrived the following mosaic of selected
theories and data from many writers, offering it not as dogma, but
merely as one possible combination on which to base further study.
[Illustration: _Decorated Clay Jar--Tonalá, Jalisco_]
Three distinct race-groups formed the early civilizations of Mexico:
the Otomí, the Maya and the Nahoa. Of these the Otomí is believed to
have been the oldest, the most migratory and warlike. Their exact rôle
in the history of primitive Mexico is so ill defined it would not be
profitable to attempt even the most nebulous outline here.
Of the Mayas much is surmised. They came probably from North America in
a migration that covered several centuries. The year of Our Lord 162 is
the date assigned for the beginning of this pilgrimage of a race.
At the close of the second century following, they were settled in
Yucatan, with territories including parts of Chiapas and Tabasco,
possessed of a splendid culture that dominated Honduras, Guatemala,
Peru, parts of North and Central America.
The Nahoa influence at about the same period embraced nearly all
the valley of Anahuac, the central mesa of Mexico. At the time of
the Conquest, the Mayas had long since vanished, while the Nahoa
civilization had reached its final growth about the year 1400, and was
in a gradual decline. The Aztecs, a migratory and aggressive tribe who
came to the valley of Anahuac about the end of the thirteenth century,
were responsible for the breaking down of the gentler Nahoa culture.
The Aztecs assimilated the Nahoa arts as the Romans did those of the
Greeks, adding the vigor and solidity of their military organization to
the body of Nahoa culture, investing the arts of the decaying peoples
with a harsher outline.
The true foundation of Mexican art is, however, a combination of these
two primary cultures, the Maya and the Nahoa. Throughout the states of
Oaxaca and Jalisco today, this influence is still astonishingly pure
and powerful.
They were at first two totally different types of art. The practical
difference was in method. All Maya stone carving was in bas-relief,
marked by a finished nervous style and exquisite detail of design.
The Nahoa sculpture was three dimensional, less fantastic, bolder in
execution. The spiritual differences were expressed as freely: the Maya
was devotional and religious, the Nahoa vividly objective and personal.
If it is not possible to fix dates and descents with certainty, we have
unlimited opportunity to study the remains of their architecture and
kindred art forms, the infallible signs whereby we may discover the
temper and intellectual level of a race.
In this study, the important fact to consider is a psychological one.
The early peoples of Mexico were dominated by the idea and practice of
religion. In every tribe, at every stage of their racial progress and
decay, faith in their gods was the compelling impulse of their lives.
Priests were the guardians of the national spirit, the instructors of
the young, the final authorities who governed the people in all matters
of moral conduct even to the smallest personal details of daily living.
Among the Aztecs even to the early part of the sixteenth century there
were thirteen principal deities, and more than two hundred inferior
gods. They ranked in importance from the War God Huitzilopotchli to
the humble little household deity charged with the responsibility of
bringing daily good fortune and happiness to the family under whose
roof he was a guest.
Five thousand priests waited on the will of these gods, serving at
altars which reflected their holiest ideal of beauty, in temples set
stone upon stone by the hands of unquestioning faith.
The nature of any art is determined by the medium of expression. The
medium of the early Mexican was stone. If they had song and poetry
and musical instruments, there is little to record that they were
considered as important forms. A few songs have survived, notably those
of the last Emperor of Texcoco, but he was comparatively of modern
times. The Nahoas made picture writing and carved panels to tell of
their wars, their feasts, their games, their victories and religious
ceremonies. They expressed themselves primarily in sculpture as the
Celts did in great songs and legends. The old Irish people were like
the Jews in this: they describe their gods and praise them in words.
The Mexicans carved the images of their deities in stone, and left them
for us to see and touch and wonder at, and to make our own legends
about them.
From this concern, this preoccupation with the will of the gods,
there sprang a strange and terrible beauty, destined to remain as the
sole record of a splendid race. The sculpture, the architecture, the
decorations of the Nahoas and Mayas are symbols of the racial mind, and
that mind was, above all, religious.
In the simplicity of the attitudes of these images, we understand that
the worship of the Mexican was a completely honest thing. Keeping their
gods alive and appeased was the difficult work of men bent on surviving
in a world filled with hostile forces. They shared this fear of the
unknown with all races of men fated to experiment with the incalculable
mysteries for the first time, with no guide except human curiosity, no
weapon except human valor.
The cruelties of their faith, so much discussed and theorised about,
were then only the cruelties shared with a terror-stricken world of
men. They would have discovered, finally, that the sun would rise
even though no victim was sacrificed on their altars. Not hatred
of humanity, but love of their gods prompted them to their ritual
sacrifices. The intimate and precious possession of life was the ideal
offering to their gods for the well-being of the race. The merely
physical cruelties were incidental and necessary. Moral cruelty was
unknown. It came later in other races, through different dogmas, with
the decadence of the religious spirit.
With this in mind, we will examine their sculptured images.
The Maya civilization was the most advanced and important of all
the old social structures of Mexico. They seem to have vanished
mysteriously at the height of their beauty, for a sustained perfection
of form marks their art from the first known example to the end.
The early bas-relief panels in the temples at Palenque, of which the
best known are the tablets of the Foliated Cross, are sophisticated
and delicate in design. The later image of Chac-Mool (called first the
Maya Bacchus, now identified as the Tiger King) is as restrained, as
classic and cool in modelling as only a race old in culture, or young
and supremely innocent, can produce. But always it is civilized--the
exaggerations of savagery are unknown.
The Nahoas followed a more natural process, upbuilding to a pinnacle of
beauty and declining into over-ripeness.
To a fantastic degree they possessed the grotesque sense at once the
property of very primitive and very decadent minds. In art, we begin
with distortions of beauty and we end with them. But the grotesqueries
differ in precisely the degree of separation between innocence and
decaying wisdom.
In their sculpture we encounter these several phases of development.
We find at first an innocent, artless animality, the crude efforts of
a child to portray the human form, the shapes of beasts and birds and
imaginary creatures, done with particularity and frankness.
The gods are monsters, the modelled portraits of men are masks with
holes gouged to represent eyes and mouths. The figures squat with
enormous hands dangling between knees upraised in the primitive seated
position.
A period followed in which the Nahoas produced a caste of builders and
artists so advanced their generic name has been mistakenly applied
to the entire nation: the Toltecs. They created stylised, chaste and
lovely images in crystal, in jade and in stone. The architecture of
this period was massive, with an abundance of bas-relief carving in
stone, more severe in design than that of the Mayas, and of great depth
in cutting. The Toltecs had no iron nor steel tools for this work; they
used only tempered copper and the flint-like volcanic glass called
obsidian.
In this epoch began the growth of a desire and necessity for beauty
not wholly religious in meaning. Purely decorative objects sold in
the public markets took the form of carved amulets meant more for
adornments than to ward off evil; masks for festivals, beads of jade
and jadeite skilfully cut and polished, jewels of gold and copper,
girdles and headdresses, all came into use for the sake of their own
beauty rather than because of religious symbolism.
Human portraits in stone and clay, many of them gorgeously colored have
been found in profusion in every buried city of ancient Mexico. In
the middle period of the Nahoa culture an aristocratic and civilized
beauty marks these faces modelled clearly and delicately under splendid
headdresses. Balance and proportion, sanity and graciousness mark the
work of this epoch. It was the high point of Nahoa culture. The century
was that of Our Lord 1200, yet it all seems as far away as the Flood
itself. The Nahoa heroes of that time, the later poet King of Texcoco,
seem to be one with the spacious myths of antiquity, akin to Dana and
Pan and the warriors Homer sung. Mexico was the final stronghold of
the great pagan gods, and even to the very day of the beginning of the
Conquest there still clings about them the atmosphere of legendary
remoteness.
A familiar flavor of the miraculous is in the religious accounts of the
later times, as recorded by the first Spanish priests. Whether these
are authentic myths, or a corruption of them due to the decline of the
race at the time of the Spanish invasion, or imperfect translations by
the historians new to the Mexican languages, we cannot be certain.
The myth of the god Quetzalcoatl, who was once a man, and became the
culture deity of the Nahoas, runs like this: Chimalma, a holy woman of
the Nahoas, swallowed a small stone of jadeite, and later was delivered
of a son, conceived thus immaculately, who was very wise and good and
gentle from his childhood. When he grew up, he taught the people the
wisdom and beauty of holy living, besides the crafts or weaving and
metal work, and the sowing of the fields. He incurred the wrath of
the wicked among his people, and went away by the sea in a skiff of
magic serpent skins. For this reason he has become associated in a
mysterious, half-spoken legend, with the waves of the sea, and with a
feathered serpent: In what way it is impossible to discover from the
endless versions I have read. He vowed to the people that he would
return, and charged them to receive him as a god at his second coming.
This legend so influenced the minds of the Nahoas, and later the
Aztecs, it opened the way for that tragic and mistaken reception of
Cortés and his soldiers, who came by way of the sea in the precise
manner Quetzalcoatl had foretold.
Another legend concerned with the immaculate mortal conception of
Immortals is told of Huitzolopotchli, the god of war, who wears on his
left foot the feathers of the humming bird. His mother saw rolling
before her in the wind a bundle of brightly colored feathers. She
placed them in her bosom, and a short while after discovered herself to
be pregnant of a god. He was born full grown, with war dress and shield
and helmet of green plumes.
This may or may not be an authentic Mexican myth. But the legend of the
creation of man is unique, original, austere as a Nahoa god in stone,
unmarred by evidences of modern revision. A young god stood in the
valley of Anahuac, near a place now called Acolman, and shot an arrow
of obsidian toward the noonday sun. It soared and descended, and when
it touched the earth, it sprang up again a living man. Though it may be
told in two lines, it is the most innocent and splendid legend I have
found in any mythology.
It is above all a happy legend. There is no death nor sin in it. Man
is created in a blaze of light, his being compounded of sun warmth
and clean arrow point, touching earth and receiving there the divine
essential energy of life. Not even among the Norse peoples have I found
a legend more epically simple and great than this.
This version of creation gives us a glimpse of another soul than the
dark and ritualistic one discovered in the old codices representing
sacrifices, and in the tales told by the Spaniards. We have become
habited to think of these people as being always a stern and terrible
race, fixed and immalleable of soul as their idols, with ponderous
headdresses crushing their frowning brows.
Those headdresses were contrived of paper and plumes and flowers, and
the wearers of them loved color as the Israelites loved perfumes and
spices. Their houses and robes, their votive cups, their temples and
their gods were all splashed with the most vivid hues. Examine any
insignificant clay figure today, recovered from the earth, not yet
broken from its mold, and you find it brilliant with stains, sulphurous
reds and yellows, burning blues and greens. This use of color is
found alike in the remains of Atzcapotzalco, in Teotihuacán near the
Pyramides, in Yucatán, and in the Tarascan figurines of terra cotta,
found in Cheran. Strange designs of animals, flowers and birds give
life and rhythm to color in vases and flowers and pots.
In the arts of dyeing, the Nahoas surpassed the others. They had
mineral and vegetable and animal color, and after the Conquest their
dye secrets became very valuable to the world.
Their special discovery was a small insect which yielded a fine quality
of purple and red dye, now called cochineal. A thick lusterless white
made from calcined stones was also originated by the Nahoas, and is
still used by the Mexicans in decorating certain kinds of pottery. We
shall see how their use of primary color has survived in other ways
also.
Engels and other scientists have been pleased to classify the early
peoples of Mexico as semi-barbarous because of their lack of domestic
animals, I believe they have overlooked the essential fact: they had
no beasts of burden nor domesticated milk-giving animals because such
beasts were not indigenous here. Their habit was to make pets of small
creatures, chiefly monkeys, a species of diminutive leopard called
_ocelotl_, and that strange breed of hairless dog, the _ixchuintli_,
of which it is recorded they could not bark until taught the art by
imported European dogs.
It is true that here devolved on human beings that burden of physical
labor shared between man and beasts in other lands. But the attitude of
the Mexicans toward animals and slaves was that of a race abreast with
the civilization of their epoch. Men were not more enslaved for this
lack of beasts than they were in countries that possessed both species
of burden-bearing animals.
Their system of measuring time was original and distinctive. We have
the symmetrical and beautiful Calendar stone of the Aztecs as enduring
testimony to the perfection of their calculations. When the Spaniards
arrived in Mexico, they discovered that the Aztec Calendar was only
five hours late by the sun, while the Christian Calendar of Pope Leo
the Great failed of precision by eleven days. Prescott gives an exact
account of their measurement of time:
“... The Aztecs adjusted their civil year by the solar. They divided
it into eighteen months of twenty days each. Both months and days were
expressed by peculiar hieroglyphics, those of the former intimating
the season of the year, like the French months at the period of the
Revolution, Five complementary days, as in Egypt, were added to make up
the full number of three hundred sixty-five. They belonged to no month,
and were regarded as peculiarly unlucky. A month was divided into four
weeks, of five days each, on the last of which was the public fair or
market day. This arrangement, different from that of the nations of the
Old Continent, has the advantage of giving an equal number of days to
each month, and of comprehending entire weeks, without a fraction, both
in the months and in the year.
“As the year is composed of nearly six hours more than three hundred
and sixty-five days, there still remains an excess, which, like other
nations who have framed a calendar, they provided for by intercalation;
not indeed, every fourth year, as the Europeans, but at longer
intervals, like some of the Asiatics. They waited until the expiration
of fifty-two vague years, when they interposed twelve days, or rather,
twelve and a half, this being the number that had fallen in arrear. Had
they inserted thirteen, it would have been too much, since the annual
excess over three hundred sixty-five is about eleven minutes less than
six hours....” (Conquest of Mexico: Prescott: Vol. I, Page 73.) They
had, in a word, calculated with such minute precision that more than
five centuries must elapse before the loss of an entire day.
Their system of numerals has been explained by Rivas Palacio in
contrast to the Hindu and Aryan systems. Whereas, in the latter methods
of computation, the essential numeral is five, and the perfect number
100, in the Nahoa system (which served all Mexico) the essential
numeral was four, and the perfect number was eighty, arrived at thus:
four plus one equals five; five times four equals twenty; and twenty
times four equals eighty.
Their religious symbolism is equally distinct. Though the Nahoas
employed characters similar to those of the Asiatics and Aryans,
they differed in spirit. Their sign of the cross, for example, found
designed on the walls of temples, or carved in stone, was their symbol
of the four cardinal points of the compass; more simply still, of the
four winds of heaven.
Various explanations have been offered of this mystical sign.
Religious writers have woven legends of primitive saints, who were
even prophesied in Revelations, who came to Mexico in the early
Christian era. Scientists have sought to identify it with its phallic
significance in the secret rituals of primitive peoples.
Their great feathered serpent was likewise free from the secret meaning
of other ancients, and was a familiar symbol of godhead. The serpent
and the sun are mysteriously related in Mexican mythology, probably
with some distant association of ideas between the life-giving sun and
fruitfulness, but there is no definite surviving legend explaining
these things.
Their social customs were marked by one tremendously important
difference from the world of their time. The position of women was
that of a completely civilized race. The legal or religious bondage of
women was unknown. They served with honor as priestesses, and had a
responsible share in the education of the children. Every evidence is
that they enjoyed a cleanly human equality in society utterly foreign
to the ideals that governed the relations between men and women of the
European and Asiatic races.
Their sense of rhythm in design was, and remains, unique. The basis
of Greek design, for example, is the crossed line. There existed no
crossed line in all Maya or Nahoa art. Even to this day it does not
appear in the pure designs used by the Mexican craftsmen. When it is
used at all, it is foreign, added since the sixteenth century.
Their line of beauty is the bold flaring circle, the uninterrupted
whirling of a leaf in the wind. This is why a design on a Guadalajara
jug today gives the impression of one unbroken harmonious line from top
to bottom.
In architecture, they had no arch, that fundamental outline in all
construction of Europe and the Orient. A square topped portal, or two
beams contrived to form a shallow inverted angle, was their conception
of a doorway. A pointed arch without a keystone was to them an ideal
expression of beauty. In this method perfect examples exist in the
ruins of Mitla and Chichen Itzá, of which the arch of Labnáh, in
Yucatán, is the most beautiful.
As we have seen, these peoples resembled their human brothers in all
elemental ideals. Students and scientists pronounce on the vessels of
aragonite, the cloudy Mexican onyx, found in the Isle of Sacrificios,
near Vera Cruz. They say they are Greek in feeling and line. They say
the Maya art is Babylonish; that the headdresses of the old Nahoas are
Egyptian; that the character writing on the walls of the Pyramides in
Teotihuacán are Chinese....
All these things do veritably have a surface resemblance to the art
creations of all races. But in their profound, racial significance they
were spontaneous and original. In nothing more than their early arts
do they resolve themselves into a people whose developed psychology
followed patterns unknown to both Europe and Asia.
[Illustration: _Jardinier Talavera--City of Puebla_]
Colonial Art