Exposing the Maya

EXPOSING THE MAYA Early Archaeological Photography in the Americas

Katia Sainson John W. Hessler

Frederick Catherwood’s “Broken Idol at Copan,” in Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (New York: Bartlett and Welford, 1844).

FIG. 11

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Early Archaeological Photography in the Americas

Catherwood’s “Casa del Gobernador, Uxmal,” in John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1843).

FIG. 12

More than any other publication, however, the work that first introduced Maya civilization to a broad European audience was John Lloyd Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán (1841) and the later Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843), with its painstakingly drawn illustrations based on field drawings by Frederick Catherwood.

The accuracy of Catherwood’s drawings came through his use of the camera lucida.

The device, invented by William Hyde Wollaston in 1807, had been used by illustrators for many years as it allowed the projection of an image onto paper, which could then be traced. Catherwood’s images were admired for their level of detail and documentary exactitude, but also for capturing “the Sublime and the Picturesque” that was the hallmark of the Romantic movement’s obsession with ruins.28 An image such as Broken Idol at Copán, with its “impenetrable jungle, ruined buildings and monuments, lightning

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Exposing the Maya strike, and dramatic lighting,”29 is as much a marvel for its precise rendering of a Maya stela as it is a study in exoticism.

Thus, before the development of photography, the dissemination of images of the great cities of the Aztec and Maya were confined to sketches and engravings, like those found in books by Kingsborough and Humboldt, and by artists like Waldeck and Catherwood. During the 1850s Baron Gros brought back images of the Acropolis, Du Camp captured Karnak and the Sphinx, and Salzmann returned with views of the Holy Land. From the earliest days of daguerreotypes, cameras were present in Mexico and being used for portraiture as well as for capturing vestiges of the preColumbian past. Stephens and Catherwood took daguerreotype images while in Yucatán, although unfortunately none survive.30 One of the rare extant images of that Louis Prélier’s daguerreotype of the Aztec Calendar Stone, 1840.

FIG. 13

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Early Archaeological Photography in the Americas

Emanuel von Friedrichsthal’s daguerreotype of a figure from Mayapan, 1840–41.

FIG. 14

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Exposing the Maya

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Désiré Charnay (1828–1915)

The Great Palace in Mitla (Oaxaca), (left side & right side). “The Great Palace, whose roof has collapsed, is otherwise intact. It is an enormous building in the shape of the Greek letter tau. Its main façade which is south facing is the most beautiful, the most important and the best preserved of the many monuments of Mitla. It is 40 meters long with a room […] with six monolithic columns that are fourteen feet tall […] and three large, low doorways.”

FIG. 18

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Exposing the Maya

FIG. 80

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Structure 33, Yaxchilán.

FIG. 81

Structure 40 with Stela 11, Yaxchilán.

FIG. 82

“Deity side” of Stela 11, Yaxchilán.

Teobert Maler (1842–1917)

117

Alfred Maudslay (1850–1931)

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Exposing the Maya

A

dela Breton is best known as a meticulous artist whose watercolors have preserved the colors and details of Mexican murals and frescoes that in most cases have not survived into the current age. Breton made a sudden, striking appearance in the world of Mesoamerican archaeology in 1894. We know little of her life before that date, other than that her family home was in Bath, in the west of England, that she had travelled to the Continent—most notably for her artistic training in Florence—and that she had dutifully cared for her aging parents until her widowed father’s death in 1887 gave her the freedom and financial means to travel. By 1894 she had stepped onto the stage, traveling extensively throughout Mexico, with a particular focus on the western regions of the country—exploring, painting, drawing, and deepening her understanding of the ruins. At that time, she started working on frescoes that had been newly discovered at Teopancaxco, apparently at the behest of Adela Breton in front of the temple mural in Chichén Itzá, Yucatán.

FIG. 112

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Watercolor copy of the painting on the west wall of the inner (or ‘painted’) chamber of the Temple of the Jaguars, Chichén Itzá.

FIG. 113

Alfred Maudslay. Thus, at the age of forty-five, she embarked on a new career, one in which she would be solicited by all the major actors in the field. By the time she came on the scene, Charnay, the Le Plongeons, Maler, and Maudslay had all preceded her to Chichén Itzá. Breton made her invaluable contribution there, creating images of the frescoes and murals at the site. Over several years she worked to rescue the wall paintings of Chichén “from oblivion, recording them before they disappeared entirely.”1 Breton’s work brought forth something that photography could not provide the scholars in the field. She copied fragile paintings that were poorly protected and could not be fully captured by photography, which was unable to render color or objects in dark spaces. She also came to believe that visualizing these ancient artefacts in their original color was key to understanding the culture that created them. Breton was a photographer in her own right, but one who used the medium purely as a tool for producing realistic reproductions of the work of earlier Mesoamerican artists in the form of illustrations. She also used her photographs, as well as those of others from

149

Photograph of Acanceh by Teobert Maler.

FIG. 124

Colored photograph of Acanceh by Breton.

FIG. 125

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watercolors at Acanceh, which she produced by working from sketches and photographs, show how she intertwined the visual media of the camera and the paintbrush to create works that are now the only remaining evidence of the colors that quickly vanished once they were exposed to the elements.12

Full-scale copy of the stucco façade of the temple on the pyramid at Acanceh. Transparent and opaque watercolor and graphite on tracing cloth.

FIG. 126

Photograph of the Acanceh frieze

by Teobert Maler.

FIG. 127

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