Alexander von Humboldt’s Vues des cordillères et monuments des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique opens with an engraving of the sculpture of an ‘Aztec priestess’ which Humboldt saw in the collection of Guillermo Dupaix during his residence in Mexico City in 1803. Humboldt maintained that ancient civilizations in the Americas were of Oriental ‘style’ if not origins. He was struck by the apparent resemblance between the headdress of the Aztec priestess and those embedded in the capitals of the columns at the Temple of Hathor at Dendera in Egypt, which Humboldt glimpsed in Vivant Denon’s Voyage dans la basse et la haute Égypte.
The circulation and display of ancient Egyptian and Mexican objects at the Louvre, the British Museum or the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid, made them increasingly accessible for comparative study, where they served as an index of the ‘stage of civilisation’ reached by non-European peoples. Some Mexican intellectuals such as José Fernando Ramírez, director of the National Museum of Mexico, firmly maintained that Mexico’s ancient past belonged to Mexico. He remained a staunch and mordant critic of all foreign origin theories in the Americas and called for more locally sensitive approaches to the study of Mexico’s past.
XILONEN
Bust of an Aztec Priestess. Alexander von Humboldt, Vues des cordilléres et monuments des peuples indigénes de l´Amérique, plase 1 (Paris: Schoell, 1801-13)
Miruna Achim
Further reading
Buchwald, J.Z., and D.G. Josefowicz (2010) The Zodiac of Paris: How an Improbable Controversy over an Ancient Egyptian Artifact Provoked a Modern Debate between Religion and Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
Ginzburg, C. (1998) ‘Style as inclusion, style as exclusion’, in Picturing Science, Producing Art, edited by C.A. Jones and P. Galison, 27–54 (London/New York, NY: Routledge).
- von Humboldt, A. (1810–13) Vues des cordillères et monuments des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique (Paris: F. Schoell).
- von Humboldt, A. (2012) Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous People of the Americas: A Critical Edition [1813], edited by Ette and V. Kutzinski (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).
- Pasztory, E. (2005) ‘Identity and difference: the uses and meanings of ethnic styles’, Thinking with Things: Toward a New Vision of Art, 157–78 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press).
- Pasztory, E. (1998) Aztec Art (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press).
