Archaeology Museum - Juarez, Mexico
Page 12

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The Coatlicue sculpture was rediscovered by accident.  Workers found it in 1790 during the repaving of Mexico City’s zocalo, or public square.  At first, the sculpture was placed in the city’s Royal and Pontifical University, but it was later re-buried after some of the students began making offerings to it.  It was removed because the priests who ran the university either thought it unworthy to sit beside their Greek and Roman antiquities, or were worried that its display would encourage a revival of the Aztec religion.  Before the reburial, a Mexican Creole astronomer, Antonio Leon y Gama, studied and sketched it, becoming the first person known to history who tried to understand pre-Columbian Mexican culture using a pre-Columbian artifact.  After reburial, it was recovered in 1803 at the request of the archaeologist Alexander Humboldt, also a church bishop, who had seen Leon y Gama’s drawing.  The sculpture was re-buried yet again after that, but was again exhumed in the 1820's at the request of another archaeologist.  This time, the viceregal authorities made the wise decision to preserve the sculpture, a decision that reflected the change in attitude about the Mexican past in the years since the Conquest.  Both it and the Coyolxauhqui sculpture are still on exhibit in Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology to this day.

Perhaps the best thing written about this famous statue of Coatlicue, and about the great artists that made it, is this passage by Robert Payne from his book about Mexico City: “(When) they depicted Coatlicue, the mother of the gods, they depicted a squat figure who is almost an abstraction of power, made up of serpents and skulls and hands, and after you have seen her, it is unthinkable that the mother of the gods could be expressed in any other way.  There is nothing warm or consoling about her.  She does not invite caresses and she is wholly absorbed in her own affairs: imperturbable and final.  She is death, and out of her womb there flows an abundant life.  In these strange adventures with the gods the Aztec artists seem sometimes to be in collusion with divinity, possessing a knowledge we dare not possess.”