Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture

7. Re-creating the Past: Ignacio Marquina’s Reconstruction of the Templo Mayor de Tenochtitlan

221 F A 7 Ignacio Marquina’s Reconstruction of the Templo Mayor de Tenochtitlan Re-creating the Past The temple precinct of Tenochtitlan occupies a canonical status in the history of Mexican art and culture. As depicted in the sixteenth-century Codex Mendoza (Fig. 7.1) and described by numerous chroniclers, the site of the precinct marks the center of the Aztec Empire and the foundation of the Mexica capital in 1325. According to Aztec histories, the Mexicas were the last of seven groups to migrate to the Valley of Mexico from a legendary place called Aztlán.1 They were guided in their migration by their patron god, Huitzilopochtli. In dreams the god informed the Mexica leaders that they would identify the right place to settle by the sight of an eagle perched on a nopal cactus. He commanded them to erect a temple in his honor on that location and divide the surrounding territory into four quarters, taking the temple as middle point.2 The Mexicas proceeded according to Huizilopochtli’s wishes. The site selected for the temple as well as for the city was therefore sacred and historically significant. In addition to commemorating the origins of the Aztec Empire, the site of the temple precinct in the vicinity of the Metropolitan Cathedral and the National Palace in the center of present-day Mexico City serves as a visual reminder of both the civilizing mission of the Catholic Church and the cultural patronage of the Mexican state. The sheer size of the main pyramid suggested by the fragmentary yet awe-inspiring archaeological remains cannot but remind the viewer of the city’s past glory. When the Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés arrived in Tenochtitlan in 1519, the city was one of the largest in the world, with a population of about 200,000 inhabitants. In his second letter to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Cortés described it as a great metropolis equaling or surpassing European cities in richness and splendor. In his account the central market of Tenochtitlan was “so large as two times the city of Salamanca , all surrounded by portals, where there are daily around sixty thousand people buying and selling.”3 He also described many large houses with beautiful gardens and an opulent court life. Cortés’s portrayal of Tenochtitlan as the superlative trophy of his conquest immediately captured the imagination 222 ■ Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture of educated Europeans and whetted the appetites of poor plebeians who later migrated to the New World in search of better fortune. Sixteenth-century chronicles created an image of the temple precinct as a grandiose stage set for the Aztecs’ sacrificial rituals, which they described in excruciating detail and illustrated to extol the humanizing merits of the Spanish conquest. The Aztecs became world famous not for their cultural achievements but for their practice of human sacrifice. Neither the reputation of the Aztecs as bloodthirsty nor the public’s keen interest in their gruesome rituals diminished through the centuries.4 Hence to many the ruins as well as the objects in the Museo del Templo Major (Museum of the Great Temple) function as reminders of a heathen culture and its barbaric practices. The Metropolitan Cathedral and the other colonial buildings around the central plaza rise as testimonies of the Spanish victory and the Christianization of Mexico. From the late sixteenth until the late twentieth century the temple precinct was known primarily through textual and pictorial representations of the site. Like the rest of the city, the precinct was destroyed almost entirely in 1521, after seventy-five days of battle between the Spanish and the Mexicas. As was customary for victors, the Spaniards built their city in the same location as the Aztec capital to indicate the triumph of Christianity over paganism. Some of the building materials from the temple precinct were used to construct the colonial city of Mexico. Even Mexico’s first cathedral incorporated stones from the precinct. The pillars that supported the Iglesia Mayor (main church) in the late sixteenth century had previously been part of a serpent wall that bounded the central pyramid.5 The present remains of the temple precinct were discovered in a series of excavations sponsored by various Mexican governments from 1900 to the present. In the most publicized of these efforts, in 1978–1982, the archaeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma unearthed the central pyramid dedicated to Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc and several of its neighboring buildings . Subsequently the Museo del...