The Man Who Invented Aztec Crystal Skulls. Jane MacLaren Walsh
in Chiapas, where they made a thorough examination and study of the ruins. His report and drawings were to be sent to Spain, “but the outbreak of the Mexican revolution [War of Independence] frustrated this design and they remained during those troublous times in the custody of Castañeda, who deposited them in the museum of the city of Mexico” (Rau 1879: 9).
Figure 3.2 Artifacts from Oaxaca drawn by José Luciano Castañeda (Smithsonian Libraries).
At the turn of the nineteenth century Alexander von Humboldt, a Prussian naturalist and explorer, arrived in the country. He was one of the few early scientists not from Spain to be allowed to travel freely in Mexico. He wrote extensively about his journey, describing the landscape, the geology, the flora, the fauna, and the monuments he saw, along with the customs of the people—all new and exotic topics to the rest of the world. Interested in ancient monuments, he prevailed upon the authorities to unearth the statue of Coatlicue in 1803, more than a decade after it had been reburied, so that he could study it and document its features. The published account of his research in Mexico, Vues des cordillères et monuments des peuples indigènes de L’Amérique, had a profound impact on European and North American readers. As American historian Benjamin Keen notes in Aztec Images in Western Thought, “Not only did it greatly increase European interest in Aztec civilization but it raised the study of the subject to a higher scientific level” (Keen 1971: 336). It was the first authoritative writing about Mexico in the Enlightenment tradition, and Europeans immediately became eager to know more about this country that had been closed to them for so long.
The resurgence of interest in the pre-Columbian past, partially the result of the discovery of the buried Aztec monuments and the Dupaix reports, culminated in the founding of Mexico’s Museo Nacional in 1825. This engendered a national effort to gather more artifacts. It would be a slow process since, then as now, most collectors were more interested in acquiring objects than in selling or giving them away. The museum occupied an upper floor of the building that housed the Real y Pontificia Universidad de México—the first university in North America, founded in 1551. The museum had three departments: antiquities, natural history, and industrial products, with displays intended principally to inform and inspire scholars and the university’s students (Acevedo 1995: 179).
In the year of the museum’s founding, an important collection of Aztec stone carvings and other artifacts was removed from Mexico and exported to France by a French collector named Latour Allard. He had purchased the artifacts from Castañeda. As it happened, Tomás Murphy, the first officer of Mexico’s first embassy in Europe, located in London, heard about the removal and proposed sale of the artifacts by Latour Allard and registered vehement objections. He asserted that the collection was not the private property of Castañeda but belonged to the Mexican people. Murphy’s protests had little effect, however, and the collection was sold to the Louvre in 1849 (Fauvet-Berthelot, López Luján, and Guimarães 2007:104–26; Sellen 2015: 70–72).
During the first half of the nineteenth century a number of European artists became interested in Mexican archeology, among them Bavarian-born Maximilien Franck, who arrived in Mexico in 1827 (Franck 1831: 283). He spent two years in the country, enjoying the hospitality of Joel Poinsett, the first United States ambassador to the newly independent republic (Franck 1831: 128). During his stay Franck sketched pre-Columbian artifacts housed in the Museo Nacional and in several important private collections in Mexico City. He completed eighty-one large folio drawings of artifacts, more than half of them illustrating some 360 individual objects then in the collections of the Museo Nacional.1
In addition to documenting the Museo Nacional’s holdings, Franck illustrated objects in the private collections of the Count of Peñasco; José Luciano Castañeda, who apparently still considered the government’s collection his own; the Marquis de Silva Nevada; and Poinsett. The images are extremely accurate, making the artifacts easily identifiable today. Franck meticulously gave measurements when important or noted that the illustration was life-size.
Figure 3.3 Stone mask and ceramic figurines in the Poinsett Collection drawn by Maximilien Franck (courtesy of the British Museum, London, AM2006, Drg. 128, pg. 21).
The Franck drawings were the first to accurately record the scale and existence of most of these extraordinary objects. Many of the artifacts ultimately became part of the Museo Nacional; however, since the museum regularly exchanged or sold objects to collectors and other institutions between the 1850s and the 1870s, some of the artifacts depicted are now in North American and European collections. The range and accuracy of Franck’s drawings of pre-Columbian objects in Mexico’s private and public collections in the late 1820s provides a basis for tracing the provenance of certain artifacts later acquired by Eugène Boban.
In 1828, the same year Franck was documenting the artifacts in the Museo Nacional, the French priest abbé Henri Barradère discovered Castañeda’s drawings in the fledgling museum. After “delicate negotiations” he obtained permission to take the drawings to Paris, where they were published in 1834 in a “sumptuous edition” (Keen 1971: 313). For most of Europe, Barradère’s publication of these illustrations provided the first glimpse of the art and monuments of pre-Columbian Mexico. It sparked intense interest among French intellectuals.2 According to historian Paul N. Edison, “French scholars likened Barradère’s Antiquités mexicaines to a second discovery and conquest of America, one that would right the wrongs of the first conquest by exhuming a dead, but noble civilization. Huge expanses of intellectual territory were suddenly available to European science” (1999: 64).
In 1839 John Lloyd Stephens, a North American lawyer and adventurer, set out to explore southern Mexico and the Yucatan peninsula; the British artist and architect Frederick Catherwood accompanied him. Following in the tradition of Dupaix, Castañeda, and Humboldt, they were eager to illustrate what they found to educate and enlighten a public thirsting for more information about these “lost” worlds. To that end Catherwood had brought along a camera lucida, a device that projects a ghostly image of what the artist sees onto a sheet of paper, producing a template that can be traced. With this equipment he was able to depict with amazing detail and accuracy the ruined cities that he and Stephens encountered. Their explorations were chronicled in a highly successful two-volume work, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, published in 1841.
Stephens and Catherwood’s work was a watershed in the early knowledge and appreciation of Mexico’s precontact past. For the first time a well received and widely circulated publication extolled the majestic achievements of Mexico and Central America’s pre-Columbian inhabitants. Catherwood’s meticulous drawings of buildings and sculptures contrasted greatly with most of what had gone before, providing a richness of detail and accuracy of scale that superseded many of the distortions prevalent in earlier renderings. Additionally, Stephens rejected the diffusionist notions then prevalent among many Europeans, who saw Egyptian and Asian influence throughout pre-Columbian art and architecture. In their publications Stephens and Catherwood clearly stated their opinion that the creators of the ruined cities and temples they had documented were none other than the ancestors of the present-day inhabitants of the region. This opened a new era in the study of pre-Columbian Mexican history. Their descriptions of ruined cities in Chiapas, the Yucatan, and Central America would entice many generations of archeologists, artists, and adventurers to follow in their footsteps.
Although the North American lawyer and the British artist had advanced ideas about the meanings and origins of what they saw, they behaved in the same rapacious way that others later did—helping themselves to what they wanted. Stephens himself pointed out the ease with which he had purchased not only ancient artifacts, but also entire archeological sites, over which he felt he held all rights. “The reader is perhaps curious to know how old cities sell in Central America … I paid 50 dollars for Copan. There never was any difficulty