Page 557 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

mask may forever
While the provenance of the
377 remain a mystery, the area of manufacture may be serpent snake heads, which have tridentlike seven-
devices on the upturned snouts unlike the
TURQUOISE MOSAIC MASK ascertained through the iconography. Although it star motif of central Mexican iconography. It
has often been misidentified as a mask of the god seems reasonable to assume, therefore, that the
Mixtec
wood with turquoise, jadeite, shell mother-of-pearl Quetzalcoatl, knowledgeable scholars have recog- mask was made by a mosaic craftsman somewhere
3
7
24 x 15 (9 /s x 5 /s) nized that the deity represented must be female: in the Mixtec region of southeastern Mexico.
the snakes entwined in the hair or headdress are This does not preclude the possibility that the
Museo Nazionale Preistorico e Etnografico Luigi found throughout post-classic Mesoamerica in mask was actually collected in Tenochtitlan by the
Pigorini, Rome images of a number of goddesses, especially those conquistadors, for many Mixtec luxury objects —
with lunar associations (such as Ix Chel, patroness of cast gold as well as turquoise mosaic—were
In his meticulously researched study, Nicholson of childbirth and medicine among the Maya). crafted for the royal palace and major Aztec tem-
(1983,171) suggested that this may be the mosaic The stepped nose ornament of the goddess ples. While Nicholson conceived of 9 Reed as the
mask listed in the 1553 inventory of the Guar- allows the identification to be even more specific. Mixtec equivalent of the Aztec water goddess
daroba of Cosimo i de' Medici, duke of Florence. Following an original proposal by Beyer (1921), Chalchiuhtlicue, "9 Reed" was in fact the calen-
Its provenance, like that of most of the Mexican Nicholson (1983, 172) has shown that this is a drical name of Tlazolteotl, goddess of childbirth
mosaics in early European collections, remains goddess known by the calendrical name 9 Reed and weaving (Caso 1967,196); she can be found
unknown; Juan de Grijalva collected mosaic masks who appears often in Mixtec screenfold manu- with this name on both page 47 of the Codex
along the Gulf Coast as early as 1518, but this scripts as well as on carved bones found in the Borgia and page 26 of the reverse of the Codex
object could have been obtained by the Spaniards Mixtec royal Tomb 7 at Monte Alban, Oaxaca. Cospi (cat. 359) and is shown naked on page 17 of
anywhere in or outside the Aztec empire. Another Mixtec element can be seen in the fire- the Codex Fejerv dry-Mayer (cat. 356). The chron-
icler Juan de Torquemada (1943-1944, 2:183)
stated that at least some of the priests in the great
temple in Tenochtitlan bore the name "9 Reed,"
presumably as impersonators of Tlazolteotl in her
role as lunar goddess. Thus the present mask
could well have been worn by one of these priests
(the back, although flat, is nevertheless pierced so
it can be worn).
What have not yet been explained are the rep-
tilian or perhaps avian jaws between which the
face rests. In the Codex Borgia, the love goddess
Xochiquetzal (who as a young lunar deity is
closely related to Tlazolteotl) is often shown look-
ing out from the beak of a quetzal bird; she also
has the fretted nose ornament, so that 9 Reed may
have more general implications of sexual desire
and fertility. M.D.C.

378

WOODEN DRUM (TEPONAZTLI)
Aztec
wood with shell inlay
5
3
5
14 x 12 x 60 (5 /2 x 4 /s x 2j /s)
CNCA—INAH—MEX, Museo Nacional de
Antropologia, Mexico City
There were several kinds of percussion instru-
ments used by the Aztecs, but only two wooden
drums: the upright huehuetl covered on top with
a skin drumhead and played with the hands (cat.
379) and the teponaztli, the horizontal slit drum
beaten with rubber-tipped drumsticks. Teponaz-
tlis, of which this is a fine example, were fash-
ioned from a single small log and hollowed out on
the inside, with an H-shaped slit on top leaving
two tongues. These tongues were struck to pro-

556 CIRCA 1492