Maya Art - Stucco Modeling

Stucco Modeling

At least since Late Preclassic times, modeled and painted stucco plaster covered the floors and buildings of the town centers and provided the setting for their stone sculptures. Often, large mask panels with the plastered heads of deities in high relief (particularly those of sun, rain, and earth) are attached to the sloping retaining walls of temple platforms flanking stairs (e.g., Kohunlich). Stucco modeling and relief work can also cover the entire building, as shown by Temple 16 of Copan, in its 6th-century form (referred to as 'Rosalila'). It has marvellously preserved plastered facades, all with their original colours, and is dedicated to the first king, Yax K'uk' Mo'. The stuccoed friezes, walls, piers, and roof combs of the Late Preclassic and Classic periods show varying, sometimes symbolically complicated decorative programs.

Several solutions for dividing up and ordering the stuccoed surfaces of buildings were applied, serialization being one them. The Early Classic walls of the 'Temple of the Night Sun' in El Zotz consist of a series of subtly varied deity mask panels, whereas the frieze of a Balamku palace, also from the Early Classic, originally had a series of four rulers enthroned above the open ophidian mouths of four different animals (a toad among them) associated with symbolic mountains. Contrarily, an Early-Classic temple frieze from Campeche (exhibited in the Museo de Antropología e Historia of Mexico City) has been centered on the large mask panel of a young lord or deity, with two lateral 'Grandfather'-deities extending their arms.

Often, a frieze is divided into compartments. Late Preclassic temple friezes of El Mirador, for example, show the intervening spaces of an undulating serpent's body filled out with aquatic birds, and the sections of an aquatic band with swimming figures. Similarly, a Classic palace frieze in Acanceh is divided into panels holding different animal figures, while a wall in Tonina has lozenge-shaped fields suggesting a scaffold and presenting continuous narrative scenes that relate to human sacrifice.

Further examples of Classic stucco modeling include the piers of the Palenque Palace, embellished with a series of lords and ladies in ritual dress, and the 'baroque', Late-Classic Chenes-style stucco entrance, beset with naturalistic human figures, on the Acropolis (Str. 1) of Ek' Balam. Roof combs usually show large representations of rulers, sometimes set within a cosmological framework (Palenque, Temple of the Sun). Unique in Mesoamerica, Classic Period stucco modeling includes realistic portraiture of a quality equalling that of Roman ancestral portraits, with the lofty stucco heads of Palenque rulers and portraits of dignitaries from Tonina as outstanding examples. Some of these portrait heads were part of life-size stucco figures adorning temple crests. The portrait modeling recalls that of certain Jaina ceramic statuettes.