Pre-Columbian Art - Mesoamerica and Central America

Mesoamerica and Central America

The Mesoamerican cultures are generally divided into three periods (see Mesoamerican chronology):

• Pre-classic (up to 200 CE)
• Classic (ca. 200–900 CE)
• Post-classic (ca. 900 to 1580 CE).

The Pre-classic period was dominated by the highly developed Olmec civilization, which flourished around 1200–400 BCE. The Olmecs produced jade figurines, and created heavy-featured, colossal heads, up to 2 meters (8 ft) high, that still stand mysteriously in the landscape. The Mesoamerican tradition of building large ceremonial centres appears to have begun under the Olmecs.

During the Classic period the dominant culture was the Maya. Like the Mississippian peoples of North America such as the Choctaw and Natchez, the Maya organized themselves into large, agricultural communities. They practised their own forms of hieroglyphic writing and even advanced astronomy. Mayan art consequently focuses on rain, agriculture, and fertility, expressing these images mainly in relief and surface decoration, as well as some sculpture. Glyphs and stylized figures were used to decorate architecture such as the pyramid temple of Chichén Itzá. Murals dating from about 750 CE were discovered when the city of Bonampak was excavated in 1946.

The Post-classic period (10th–12th centuries) was dominated by the Toltecs who made colossal, block-like sculptures such as those employed as free-standing columns at Tula, Mexico. The Mixtecs developed a style of painting known as Mixtec-Puebla, as seen in their murals and codices (manuscripts), in which all available space is covered by flat figures in geometric designs. The Aztec culture in Mexico produced some dramatically expressive examples of Aztec art, such as the decorated skulls of captives and stone sculpture, of which Tlazolteotl (Woods Bliss Collection, Washington), a goddess in childbirth, is a good example.