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Secrets
of the Temple
Using
infrared photography and other sources, a team led by art historian
Mary Miller has brought back to life an extraordinary record of
the Maya civilization.
November
2002
by Mark Alden Branch '86
In 1946,
a group of Lacandon
Maya Indians led Giles Healey '24, a photographer for the United
Fruit Company, into the temple complex at Bonampak,
a ruined city in Mexico from the eighth century. What Healey saw
there -- three rooms painted with elaborate polychrome murals
-- shattered illusions that the Maya were a peaceful people and
shed light on the sophistication of their arts, culture, and economy.
Since then, archeologists and art historians have been engaged in
a close reading of the murals, searching for clues about the Maya
in paintings that were made just before their civilization collapsed.
But such research has
been hampered by the difficulty of viewing murals damaged by 1,200
years of calcium deposits, flaking paint, and other wear. After
decades of efforts to document the murals -- beginning with photographs
made by Healey himself -- a team led by Mary
Miller, the Vincent Scully Professor of the History of Art,
has completed a seven-year project to provide a definitive record
of the murals with state-of-the-art photographic methods. With new
and old documentation in hand, Miller hired painters Heather Hurst
and Leonard Ashby to reconstruct the murals at one-half scale. The
project was completed last fall, and one of the murals is on display
at the Peabody Museum of Natural History through spring of next
year.
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"When
you have to copy every line, you come to a different understanding
of the people who did the original."
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"If you want to choose
any single artifact from the ancient American past, this is the
most informative and complex," says Miller, who wrote a book
about the murals in 1986. "This is an account of the Maya court,
including the wars and battles of a ruling family in crisis at the end of the eighth century, filled with pomp, pageantry, and sacrifice."
The murals fill the
walls and vaulted ceilings of three small rooms in the Bonampak
complex. Their depictions of Maya life range from tableaus of musicians
and state visits to graphic scenes of violence and sacrifice. Room
1 features a set of visiting ambassadors on one side paying tribute
to a king. (Next to him is a bundle marked with hieroglyphics indicating
that it contains 40,000 cacao beans.) An heir to the throne is being
presented to the court. On the other side of the room, musicians
and dancers prepare for a ritual dance. Room 2 depicts a bloody
battle, with scenes of defeated captives being tortured and mutilated.
And in Room 3, the royal family appears again alongside scenes of
ritual sacrifice. Throughout, the colorful figures are sharpened
by a calligraphic black outline that is also used to make hieroglyphic
captions for some of the images. Rooms 1 and 2 are complete, but
work on Room 3 seems to have stopped somewhat abruptly -- leading
Miller to wonder if the artists were called away to battle during
the empire's last days.
Even
before Miller and her team began the Bonampak Documentation Project
(BDP),
the murals were an extraordinary resource for those who wanted
to understand the Maya. Efforts to reproduce and disseminate the
images in the murals began not long after Healey's first visit.
Healey himself captured the murals with conventional photographs
and infrared photography, which brings out details -- particularly
the black outlines -- that otherwise are no longer visible. In 1947
and 1948, a pair of illustrators made two large-scale copies of
the mural on site that Miller says were "remarkable" in their accuracy, except that the artists avoided confusing or problematic details.
"Fortunately, their sins were of omission, not commission," says
Miller. This early documentation would prove valuable later on,
as the calcifications that obscured the murals became more pronounced
in the 1960s because of mistakes in the conservation process.
In the 1980s, an initiative
to scrape some of the calcifications off their surfaces brought
whole sections of the murals back to life. Building on this new
work, Miller founded the BDP in 1995. Funded by grants from the
Getty Foundation and the National Geographic Committee on Exploration
and Research, the BDP photographed the murals with color transparency
film, infrared still photography, and infrared video.
Once all the visual
information had been assembled and studied, Miller hired Heather
Hurst, an archeological artist with experience in Central America,
to paint a reconstruction of each room's murals. The idea was to
restore as much detail as possible to the murals without overspeculating.
"We brought back things that were lost," says Hurst. "But we didn't
fill things in where we didn't know what was there."
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"They expanded the understanding
of the story that is being told in the murals."
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Setting up a studio
above a Chapel Street tattoo parlor, Hurst and her assistant, Leonard
Ashby, pored over the photographic records to recreate the vivid
figures, elaborate dress, and complex hieroglyphics. Along the way,
they made some new discoveries and expanded the understanding of
the story that is being told in the murals. Hurst, for example,
observed that the heir to the throne depicted in Room 1 has a pattern
of face paint that elsewhere in the murals is seen only on females,
leading the team to speculate that, as Miller puts it, "the availability
of only female heirs may have caused some difficulty for the family
and may lie behind the creation" of the paintings.
For Hurst, who took
a course in Maya hieroglyphics to prepare for this project, working
in the shadows of ancient Maya artists was a "very special project."
She hired Ashby as an assistant once it became clear that the work
was a two-person job: One painter had to keep the paper wet while
the other followed with paint. Miller suggests that the original
murals were likely painted by a team working in much the same way.
Although they guessed that the work would take nine months, they
finished last fall after two years of full-time work.
"When
you have to copy every line, you come to a different understanding
of the people who did the original," says Ashby.
Hurst adds that they established connections not only with the original
painters but also the subjects, with whom they spent an inordinate
amount of time. "We would actually say goodbye to the people every
night when we left," she remembers.
To get the colors right,
the BDP team retained Mexican pigment specialist Diana Magaloni-Kerpel,
who identified the sources of the original paints and mixed up versions
in her laboratory. This gave the team an understanding of what the
colors would have looked like when they were new, and the modern
watercolors that were used in the reconstruction were matched to
these ancient pigments.
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"Maya
viewers would have reacted much as we do to gold -- there
would have been a big 'ooohh' factor."
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As Hurst and Ashby finished each of the three rooms, they were visited by Miller and two of
her colleagues in the BDP: Stephen Houston '87PhD of Brigham Young
University and Karl Taube '88PhD of the University of California
at Riverside. (Beatriz de la Fuente of the National University of
Mexico was also on the team.) The scholars would examine the murals
from top to bottom, checking frequently against the photographic evidence. "They went over every single line," says Hurst. "And sometimes
there would be some changes -- we'd have to go back and add or change
a toenail or a tooth or an eyelash."
Now that the paintings
are complete, they are expected to become the definitive reconstruction
of the Bonampak murals, a source for students and scholars around
the world. Last May, during President Richard Levin's trip to Mexico,
Miller presented the BDP's documentation to the Mexican government.
Miller also intends to publish the paintings in a book, and she
hopes the paintings themselves will find a home on exhibit at Yale
or elsewhere.
As for Hurst, her next
project is a reconstruction of a much earlier Maya mural that was
discovered last year in Guatemala. "Leonard and I were always joking
about how there's no job security here -- how nobody will be finding
us any more of these murals. Then just about the time we finished,
they found one."
For Miller, the murals
and the process of reconstructing them have taught her more about
the Maya -- particularly the sophistication of both their art and
their economy. For example, pigment analysis revealed that the blue
paint of the original murals has azurite -- a rare and expensive
mineral from northern Mexico -- ground into it, indicating a far-flung
system of trade. (Because of the rarity of the blue pigment, says
Miller, Maya viewers of the murals would have reacted to the blue
areas much as we do to gold. "There would have been a big 'ooohh'
factor," she says.) Further, she says, the presence of lords and
ambassadors in Room 1 suggests that the Maya court was "a place
of incredible magnetism," attracting emissaries from up to 150 miles
away.
As
for their art, Miller notes the sophistication of the murals' composition
-- with recurring characters and themes that suggest that
the three-room scheme was planned out before any painting began.
The representations include "repetition but not redundancy," she
says, pointing to the subtle differences in skin tone, clothing
accessories, and facial expression among figures that are at first
glance identical.
But the strife evident
in the paintings -- and in the abruptly halted work on Room 3 --
warns that this society would soon collapse. "The paintings are
a window on a world that could not know its future," says Miller.
But thanks to their commitment to recording their history -- and
thanks to the BDP's efforts to restore it -- we are fortunate enough
to know their past.  |
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