When the Spaniards came to Mexico in the year 1519, the Mayas had long
since abandoned their splendid cities and were building no others of
like beauty. The Pyramides at Teotihuacán were mounds of earth which
the strangers regarded incuriously as natural hills. Nahoa civilization
had reached its height two centuries before and declined with the
death of the poet King Nezahualcoyotl of Texcoco. From thence it was
gradually absorbed by the Aztec dynasty, and the city of Tenochtitlan
became the center of wealth, power and culture of the race.
The Zapotecas and Mixtecas, ancient allies, occupied the present state
of Oaxaca; they were divided in language, the customs and arts that
once were one had diverged slightly, the Zapotecas toward the Aztec,
the Mixtecas toward the Maya. Though both nations possessed the richest
languages and picture writing in Mexico at this time, the Mixtecas were
superior in civilized arts. They were settled in the South and West of
the state, a gentle and tranquil people given to cultural development.
The Zapotecas were objective, warlike, militaristic; they helped the
Mixtecas to conquer the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and held their ground
by force of arms. In spite of this, it is the Mixteca spirit in art
that survives in the state of Oaxaca today.
It was with the newer, intensely warlike Aztec in the city of
Tenochtilán that the invaders were to deal. The Conqueror has always
the first word. Centuries must elapse before the defeated peoples
can find a hearing for themselves. According to the Spanish writers,
they found here a race curiously civilized, but atrociously savage in
war; lovers of beauty, worshippers of mystical gods, in spiritual and
physical bondage to a religion founded on ritual sacrifice. Nearly all
of the historians that followed accepted without question the Spanish
point of view that the benefits of civilization had been righteously
bestowed upon barbarians by the bitter charity of the sword. Having
achieved a substitution by force of their ideals over those of the
Mexican, they rested in arrogant certainty of their right to impose
their own half-developed culture, derived from a mixture of Europe and
the Orient, upon a people whose blood was pure, and whose culture was
grown evenly in one soil.
There ensued a collision of antipathies shocking to the imagination. It
must have been as if two alien planets struck and fused. The story has
been told many times, by makers of legends, by later historians groping
among confused and conflicting legends. Yet they somehow achieve unity
when considered as a whole. It seems that only a day elapses between
that half-legendary ancient world of the Nahoa and the Maya, to the
founding of New Spain that suddenly identifies Mexico with the modern
world.
One steps from the half light of the centuries before the Conquest into
the year 1519, and thereafter we have a record of events insufficient,
fragmentary, but comparatively clear. However obscured with personal
and religious and political motives, distorted occasionally with belief
in the miraculous, seen through the eyes of prejudices incomprehensible
to us now, since we are bound by different prejudices, the story still
has form and outline; it lends itself to the truth.
After the shock of conquest there began the making of a new nation
in Mexico, a slow series of rebirths, a gradual absorption of colors
and fibres from many sources; Mexico became New Spain, a nation torn
from its old gods and inborn visions, thereafter to take on the forms
of faith of the conqueror, the laws of an alien world, the customs of
strangers.
Teocallis were razed, and churches set over the places where they had
been. New arts were added to the old, and were amalgamated with them.
These arts came by way of the Spanish crown, but they were borrowed
from the greater and older nations of France and Italy....
The Mexican arts amazed and delighted the strangers, who praised
them in their chronicles--those extravagant documents that are such
curious blendings of religious fervor, curiosity, appreciation and
rapacity--and long descriptions of the native crafts remain as the
pleasantest stories brought out of that dolorous period.
They tell of the goldsmiths of Azcapotzalco, who wrought in gold and
silver filigree, chains and necklaces and earrings and bracelets, in
feathery and lace-like designs as minute and painstaking as those of
the Chinese. It is as different from Chinese filigree as the Chinese is
distinct from the Neapolitan silver work. The potters of Cholula were
then renowned for making vases in a form resembling the classical Greek
urn, but decorated with designs in that thick, vivid, unmixed paint
they invented and used so perfectly.
The painters of Texcoco, the mat makers of Quautitlán, the stone
cutters from Tenajocan, all brought their wares to the markets of the
throne city of the Aztecs. The florists of Xochimilco fashioned flowers
into decorative shapes with a long patience of execution which is still
the most remarkable thing about the flower arrangement of the Mexican.
Plume work, a special craft developed by these people to the dignity
of a fine art, was then in its fullest beauty. Entire mantles were
contrived of feathers woven in color compositions and patterns
intricate as tapestry. On their simple hand looms they wove exquisite
cloth in cotton and a finely spun fibre made from the maguey or
henequen plant. Garments and curtains were made of this material, as
well as their breast-plates, tightly woven and quilted, a stout and
durable armor against their own weapons, but not, as Prescott reminds
us, proof against the musketry of the Spaniards.
Temples and houses were ablaze with light and color, curtained with
woven feathers and dyed cloth, their temples adorned with carved panels
and the images of their gods. Even while they praised the beauty of the
new country and its social structure, the fanaticism that accompanied
the spirit of conquest conspired in the minds of the Spaniards, and
prompted them to blot out invaluable records and monuments. They were
not interested in the subtleties of research among peoples whom they
considered merely as advanced savages, inhabiting a rich and desirable
territory.
[Illustration: _Serape (Woolen Blanket), San Miguel Allende, Hidalgo_]
Their purpose was to exterminate the rebellious, establish the church
and the power of Spain, and to amass wealth for the Spanish crown. Art
was left to grow or perish of itself.
Silently, ceaselessly, the Mexican spirit renewed and expressed itself
in the making of beauty. It ran like a dark flood of dreams into all
channels of Colonial life. It stained every idea, every physical
manifestation of the slowly changing Mexican race.
The churches were the first and most important imported expressions
of art in New Spain. They were designed, in the main, by Italian and
French architects, built and decorated by native artists. Whereupon
strangely they are Mexican; because an Aztec ground the colors and
executed the designs, and carved the wood and the stone, and made the
tiles for the domed roofs. His inalienable beauty-wisdom had the final
triumph.
Writers of that period are accustomed to declare that civilization
progressed in Mexico more rapidly within the first eighty years of the
Spanish occupation than in any other country of North America or Europe
during the same period.
It is true that they brought their crafts, taught them to the natives,
utilized and commercialized them with modern practical thoroughness. A
book was printed for the first time in Mexico City in 1536. The printer
was Juan Paoli from Brescia, Italy. He was brought here to publish
ecclesiastical works, and his press flourished. The first University in
America was founded by the Jesuits in Mexico City in the year 1533, a
building now used as a Preparatory School to the National University.
Weaving and ceramics were developed rapidly. In Puebla and Oaxaca
splendid silks and wools were woven from raw materials got from the
markets of Asia, and exported in great quantities. Wool was introduced
in Mexico by the Spaniards, and took the place of the fine hair of
rabbits, and plumage which the Aztecs had hitherto used for weaving
warm garments.
An immediate and perfect use was found by the native for the more
substantial wool of the sheep. He wove serapes and rugs in orderly,
geometric patterns after the old style, that gave to them a classical
permanence of value. The first ones were sober and dark, but gradually
they grew into brilliance, with designs of birds and flowers and
stylised figures of animals.
They developed a genius for leatherwork, especially in saddle making,
a craft essentially Spanish, since the Mexicans had no horses previous
to the Conquest. Under their hands, the saddle and all appurtenances
of horsemanship became elaborated beyond anything known in Spain, and
today the Mexican saddle is a marvel of costly workmanship in tooled
leather and chased silver.
The characteristic Mexican faculty to imitation of design and method,
combined with an entirely alien feeling for color and execution brought
about a subtle shifting of surface expression. His ability to adapt and
use strange forms, under curious conditions, was the foundation for his
new art, destined to become racial and genuinely expressive.
[Illustration: _Candle Sticks and Plate--Talavera Ware--Puebla_]
[Illustration: _Decorated Wooden Box--Olinalá, Guerrero_]
The primary use of his imitative faculty was commercial. The native,
out of his soul’s necessity, made his wares first things of beauty. But
he must also use them, and sell them. They must be beautiful and useful
objects, not costly, for the use of an impoverished people. In a very
limited way, they worked in bronze, silver, gold and stone, but mostly
they wrought in clay and wood. They transposed and recreated everything
that came to their notice, from whatever source and in whatever
material it might appear.
Out of the influences that surrounded them they selected those things
most in accord with their own ideals of beauty, those designs not too
violently opposed to their own conception of form, in effect those
patterns that resembled their own previously accepted motifs. For three
centuries the Mexican was influenced by art expressions from Spain,
through Spain from the Moors, from the Orient; from Japan, Persia, the
Philippines, above all, China.
The results are happily still apparent in designs wherein are
commingled, in a strange harmony, pomegranates, lacy leaves from Spain,
peacocks from Persia and mandarins from China, traced on jicaras, bowls
and pots. In the Puebla pottery of that period, and on the painted and
lacquered chests, knights on horseback, ladies in enormous skirts,
birds as large as the trees they perch in, strange animals from the
weird other-worlds of the Oriental imagination, foregather amiably with
an effect of loveliness.
That sense of the grotesque which we have noticed took hold of these
foreign emblems. In the religious sculpture executed by the first
Christianized Mexicans, distorted Aztec Christs bleed from wounds, not
the legendary sacred five, but from as many as a human form can support
and still be recognizable. In Manú, Yucatán, there exists an outdoor
shrine, a cross roughly hewn from stone, and the hanging figure is
wholly Aztec, resembling images found in the older ruins.
The grotesqueries began changing in form, but they were still distinct,
still quite other in feeling than the demons and gargoyles of Europe,
far removed from the squat, sly humor of the Chinese figures.
Those sixteenth century merchant crafts plying between China and Mexico
brought not only merchandise, but ideas. Lacquer, black and red, and
blue porcelain jars were left here by the sailors, and immediately
the Mexican began making boxes lacquered in all colors, encrusted, or
painted in flat designs over the smooth foundation.
In Puebla, then a newly founded city, the making of a certain kind of
pottery became the chief industry. The first Potter’s Guild in New
Spain was chartered there: an organization of pure Indian and Spanish
craftsmen, with a strict clause declaring that no negro or person of
mixed blood could be a member. Puebla Talavera ware was during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a synonym for excellent pottery.
The story of Puebla pottery has happily been written, and serves as
an example of the methods used by the Spaniards in introducing their
crafts and arts to the Mexican. Puebla de los Angeles was founded about
the year 1532, and the first account of the new industry centered there
was given by Fray Geronimo de Mendieta in his “Historia Ecclesiastica
Indiana.” I quote from the translation given in “Maiolica of Mexico” by
Edwin Atlee Barber:
“After they (the Mexicans) became Christians and saw our images from
Flanders and Italy, there is no altar ornaments or image, however
beautiful it may be, that they will not reproduce and imitate. There
were artisans in pottery and vessels for eating and drinking purposes,
and these were very well made although the workmen did not know how
to glaze them. But they soon learned from the first craftsman who
came over from Spain in spite of all he could do to guard and hide
the secret from them. And finally this may be understood as a general
rule, that nearly all the curious and beautiful works of every class
of trades and arts are now (1596) being carried forward in the Indies
(at least in New Spain or Mexico) are being done and finished by the
Indians.”
Who this ungenerous craftsman was no one seems to remember. But
sometime within the first half century of the new regime, it is certain
that a small group of friars from a Dominican monastery in Talavera
de los Reyes (Spain) came out to join their brethren in Puebla and
instructed the natives in the making of the famous Talavera ware. This
pottery had its first inspiration from Persia through the Moors, and
later from China: transplanted to Mexico, it followed the same line of
development until the end of the seventeenth century, when the Italian
influence crept in, and changed small details of design and color.
The Mexicans absorbed everything, and grew slowly away from their
teachers. The transition in this particular instance was slow. Almost
two hundred years elapsed before the Puebla ware became a completely
Mexican thing. Gradually, the flowers and foliage became bolder,
the designs were taken from native plants; the blue coloring became
heavier, the patterns were raised in high relief, and the tattooed
effect now so familiar came into popularity. The shapes reverted
slightly to the primitive, and from simple blue and white the native
potters used their own varied and exuberant schemes of color. A Puebla
bowl now often rivals a batea (wooden painted tray) from Tehuantepec
for gayety and vividness.
The history of Puebla tile is not so well known, but they probably
date from about 1550. They were called Azulejos, from a word meaning
blue, and were at first literally blue tiles. They changed in character
rapidly, and were for two hundred years a most characteristic form of
decoration for houses and chapels, fountains and patio pavements. In
many old houses there are large panels relating legends in the manner
of European tapestry, picturing episodes in the lives of saints and
warriors, or used simply as decorative motifs filled with birds and
animals and figures imitating the Aztec designs.
Until the beginning of the nineteenth century these tiles were used
lavishly all over Mexico. The most famous examples of tile work are the
Casa de los Azulejos in Mexico City, the Holy Well in the Chapel at
Guadalupe, the Tepozotlan Convent in the State of Mexico, and several
churches in Guanajuato, especially the exquisite small church called
La Compaña, as well as the Church of San Francisco de Acatepec near
Puebla.
[Illustration: _Decorated Chairs--City of Aguascalientes_]
[Illustration: _Equipales (Leather, Wood and Bamboo)--Jamay, Jalisco_]
[Illustration: _Bead Work Child’s Dress--Puebla_]
[Illustration: _Thread Lace--San Luis Potosi_]
The imported forms of architecture became, in the hands of the
Mexicans, a separate creation. The early churches of Mexico are
full of this Aztec strength and heaviness. Even roses and Cupids
and emasculated saints become virile and significant--they are not
the roses and saints and Cupids of Spain. Later, the Mexican-born
Spaniards who designed in all the arts, guided by some vague tradition
of classical proportion, produced merely another Barrocco style,
coincidental with a similar decadence in the old country. But whereas
in Europe two white and civilized forms merged and decayed, in
Mexico the fusion was Spanish and Indian: and Mexican Barrocco, “the
Churrigueresco,” amazingly genuine and alive, is the curious result.
The only vivid and quick artistic impulse of this country grew
in the soul of the native. The Spanish artist who maintained the
foreign traditions painted merely after the style of his own country,
imitating without adapting, lacking inspiration of his own, growing
each generation farther away from his sources, until at the close of
the eighteenth century the so-called aristocratic art was a puerile
childish copy of the European seventeenth century manner.
Aside from this academic school, however, a national spirit was
developing among the Mexican-born Spaniards, and a tremendously
increasing class of Spanish-Indios who were genuinely Mexican in
feeling. During the later Colonial times, they called themselves
Mexicans and followed native customs as a patriotic duty. This period
was fruitful in the production of the native crafts. Everybody made use
of the rugs and bateas and serapes, the painted boxes and furniture,
the saddles and potteries. They adopted a highly individualized native
costume entirely Spanish in design, called the Charro. It was usually
made of finely dressed leather, embroidered in silver and colors. The
hats and saddles designed to complete this horseman’s equipment were
splendid and very costly.
The dresses for the women, especially the country costumes, were of
gaily dyed silks weighted with bead embroideries and native lace. The
most beautiful of these dresses originated in Puebla and was called
the China Poblana. It has latterly passed into disuse, but is still
seen during fiestas and in the Mexican theatre. As early as 1840 Madame
Calderon de la Barca noticed that it was no longer used by ladies of
the better society--a pity, for it is most graciously feminine and
becoming.
After the Independence of Mexico from Spain was established, the
national psychology shifted, and it became once more the fashion to
imitate Europe. All architecture and aristocratic art since 1825
degenerated into the European manner, and that manner mostly second
rate French. The epoch of Maximilian completed the havoc, with
wholesale importations of French furnishings and styles at the lowest
period of taste known since the decadence of Greece. Mexican art
disappeared from popularity, a thing admired only by students and
collectors, and used only by the Indio.
During these changes, political and social, the native has remained
racially and spiritually static. In common with all peasantry, he
derived his ideas from the fine arts--not only the imported and foreign
arts, but from his own magnificent traditions, filtered them through
his own understanding, translated them into his common speech:
the result is a thing of superb beauty and strength. He grew each
generation a step further away from the object he had imitated--like
the Mexican-born Spaniard who copied the methods of Spain--but with
this difference, that the native added always more and more of his own
feeling and psychic reaction, until at once the thing was his own, an
interpretation of beauty, national, personal--even more, absolutely
individual.
For he works after his own fashion, and creates each smallest object
as a unique thing, and does nothing twice alike. Each object has its
own incorruptible character, even to the pattern on the jug in which he
draws his water, the serape which serves him both as cloak and bed.
[Illustration: _Baskets and Coin Purses, Palm Leaf and Hemp--Oaxaca_]
[Illustration: _Lacquered Wooden Tray--Patzcuaro, Michoacan_]
[Illustration: _Silver Necklace and Ear Rings--Michoacan_]