Lives Of The Gods Divinity In Maya Art

Art work courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art / Museo de Sitio de Toniná / Secretaría de Cultura-INAH.-Mex

Per a Mayan myth, when the world began, in 3114 B.C., it took the gods three tries to get humans right. The first attempt, using mud, was a wash; wood didn't make the cut, either. Finally, corn hit the spot, and people came into being. A few millennia later, Mayan artists paid homage to their makers by creating dazzling figures themselves, notably during the Classic period, between 250 and 900 A.D. (They also portrayed powerful mortals.) A hundred such works—in stone, painted ceramic, obsidian, jade, conch shell, and some (very rare) carvings in wood—are on view in this magnificent show at the Met. It presents a culture of enticing complexity, in which the immortals who conceived the sun, the moon, and the rain (to name some of the show's major themes) were fearsome but never invulnerable. One sandstone sculpture, from around 700 A.D., was made for the Centipede Kings, who ruled Tonina, a Mayan city in modern-day Chiapas, Mexico; it portrays Yax Ahk’, a historical warrior, and a royal himself, who was captured as a prisoner of war and forced to impersonate a jaguar deity who had been burned to death. Happily, rebirth was possible, too: the dramatically installed exhibition includes several exquisitely modelled clay whistles, in which tiny maize gods emerge from flowers, newborns in full ceremonial regalia.

Nov. 21-Apr. 2

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