Exhibit of the week: The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire

Getty Villa, Malibu, Calif.

Through July 5

When Cortés and his conquistadors overran the Aztec empire in 1520, they found “a society unlike any they had encountered hitherto,” said Emily Sharpe in The Art Newspaper. The natives of the region that was to become Mexico worshipped strange gods, for whom they created elaborate monuments and sacrificed human victims. How could the colonizers explain such a culture to the folks back home? “In an effort to understand this New World custom and mythology, they used a European comparison, likening the Aztecs to another mighty empire—the Romans.” That parallel, which proved persuasive but also misleading, is thoroughly explored in a new exhibition at the Getty Villa.

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The Getty Villa has never before mounted a show of New World objects, and that alone makes this its “most surprising exhibition” in years, said Suzanne Muchnic in the Los Angeles Times. The Villa, dedicated almost exclusively to classical European art, here displays works from its permanent collection merely to help the viewer understand Renaissance Europeans’ own visual frame of reference. But “the visual power center” of this show is the collection of enormous Aztec terra cotta sculptures, on loan from Mexico’s most important museums, and “the linchpin of the exhibition” is a seemingly unassuming illustrated book. The so-called Florentine Codex was one of the first European attempts to understand and explain Aztec culture, said Candace Jackson in The Wall Street Journal. It has been absent from the Americas “since it left Mexico in the 1580s.” Written and illustrated lavishly by 16th-century Franciscan priest Bernardino de Sahagún, this “watercolor-filled” tome pairs up Aztec gods and goddesses with Roman equivalents.

Of course, Sahagún “took liberties” in trying to create parallels between the cultures, said Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times. Childishly drawn Aztec figures are shown, “often carrying a shield and holding an attribute—a sheaf of wheat, for example, or a thunderbolt-style scepter.” Even when the similarities are valid, however, they’re superficial. The true link between the cultures was the way both used religious imagery to wield power. After all, “monumentality is essential to an art of empire.” Here, an enormous greenstone head of a goddess, broken off from its base, suggests a truly massive original. Nearby, “an astonishing, life-size terra cotta and stucco figure of a skeletal demon leans forward, his liver suspended from his rib cage.” The large, symmetrical, brutally simplified forms are “downright confrontational,” staring down at you like the very eyes of the empire, keeping watch over its subjects.