![]() ![]() Here, in its opulent presence, ready to vie with the finest cities of Europe, rises an erasure of all the past, the heart of the American civilization Humboldt is attempting to resurrect. These specifics may, Humboldt drily remarks, interest those who study the conquest of Mexico. ![]() To the right of the cathedral now stands the palace of the viceroy of New Spain to the left once stood Montezuma’s own palace. Behind the cathedral once stood the palace of the king of Axajacatl, where Montezuma lodged his guests, the Spaniards. Humboldt’s image is therefore a palimpsest: where the square stands, there formerly stood the spacious temple of Mexitli. Not one stone was left on another, and out of Tenochtitlan’s shattered buildings the Spanish quarried the materials for their new capital. It shows the center of what was once her city-but now it is the center of Mexico City, a trim and elaborate European square built, as Humboldt points out, on the site of Tenochtitlan, “totally destroyed” by the Spanish in 1521. Humboldt’s next plate points directly to the cause of her silence and mystery (fig. She reigns, silenced, mysterious, alien yet familiar, over the entirety of Humboldt’s works. In the vacuum left by the wholesale Spanish destruction of her civilization, the words she speaks cannot be heard. Does this mean that the peoples of the Nile sent emissaries to the New World? Or did the Aztecs invent, on their own, similar sculptural forms? Humboldt thinks the latter, though he does note a case of genuine long-distance transmission: the pearls that ornament the priestess’s forehead show that the cosmopolitan city of Tenochtitlan, located high in the Mexican interior plains, was in contact with the California coast, “where pearls are fished up in great numbers.” Contemplating the statue leaves Humboldt with a congeries of questions: Why has she feet but no hands? Is she truly a priestess? A deity? Or simply an Aztec woman? Where did such imagery originate? Perhaps here is a reflection of the light from Asia that led to “the commencement of American civilization.” But these questions cannot be answered. 1).Ĭrouched like a sphinx, stony, inscrutable, she gazes blankly out over your right shoulder, lips parted as if to speak. If you are ever so lucky as to find a copy, open it to the first plate, “Statue of an Azteck Priestess” (fig. ![]() Among the first was a massive coffee-table extravaganza titled Vues des Cordillères, et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique ( Views of the Cordilleras and monuments of the indigenous peoples of America). Once Alexander von Humboldt settled down in Paris after his monumental five-year journey through the Americas, he started to publish books. ![]()
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