Maya Christian Murals of Early Modern Yucatán, Amara Solari and Linda K Williams, 2024, University of Texas Press
If scholarship could be understood through colour, then the most meaningful tint is grey—depicting realities that are neither black nor white, but hues of something in between.
So it is with the most well informed efforts to understand colonial history, which seek to discern the complex shades and layers of societies in conditions of both millennial continuity and dramatic cultural change.
This was the case in colonial Yucatán, a land of Maya tradition newly dominated by Catholic mission church complexes with resident Franciscan friars, which for European painters eager to make their mark in the centres of Spain’s American empire was very much off the beaten track.
To inculcate their faith in their congregation and extend the all-consuming work of conversion through iconography, these friars relied on a local resource that had no equal in much of the rest of New Spain—Maya artists.
The painting of mural art in convents throughout the peninsula was dependent on Maya painters, whom the Franciscans learned quickly had for centuries been selected from elite lineages within Indigenous society to be trained in the pictorial arts.
Thus the Christian missionaries brought youths from prominent Indigenous families to reside in the conventos and taught them both the theological doctrines of Catholicism while often instructing them in visual techniques.
As Amara Solari and Linda Williams show throughvisual evidence from mural paintings, these Maya painters, sculptors, architects, stonemasons, carvers, gilders and weavers would go on to ultimately direct the course of Indigenous Christianity in this region.
The authors have compiled a groundbreaking work that is the first to address and examine the extant corpus of what they term “Maya Christian murals” in 24 structures across the Yucatán Peninsula, a body of artwork that they argue represents a century and a half of distinctly Maya creative production.
Their ambition is not to bang a drum, but to examine the greyness of Maya Christian art or, as they say, “to find a balance between the poles of ‘agency’ and ‘conquest’ that have guided scholarly inquiry in the historical, ethnohistorical, and art historical disciplines for the past generation”.
They explain this approach through their own metaphorical paradigm for the “visual confluence” that occurred in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Yucatán: the grafting of plants. This conceives of the rich and ancient cultural system of the Maya as a rootstock cultivated by centuries of cultural development onto which was grafted the religious system of Spanish Catholicism.
They write: “The result of this pairing was the eventual flowering of a blossom, a flower that by all appearances presented as European but was distinct from its continental prototype at the molecular level. In this book, we refer to this bloom, this newly emerged religious system, as ‘Maya Catholicism’.”
The authors have devoted themselves to unpicking the subtle nuances of culturally Maya significance beneath artworks that decorate the walls of Yucatán’s churches which appear, at first sight, to imitate standardised European models indistinguishable from their Iberian precedents.
Theirs is a work of breathtaking conviction, truly a labour of love, based on the detailed examination of this compelling oeuvre through the lens of intercultural exchange.
It explores the meaning of these paintings against the backdrop of the “violently cataclysmic changes” that had been visited upon Indigenous society by the colonising institutions of the Catholic Church and the Spanish Crown to show that, in every case, these murals offered an opportunity for a distinctly Maya interpretation of Christianity.
With insight and hope, the authors conclude: “In the end, these murals embody the potentiality of Indigenous agency in this fraught historical moment and the capability of public art to be a defensive weapon in all moments of cultural violence, a space for alternative world making.”
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Categories: Mexico, North America