Alexander von Humboldt’s Vues des cordillères et monuments des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique is a striking album of 69 ‘views’ of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ or human-made monuments, which the author ‘collected’ over the course of his travels in the Americas between 1799 and 1804.¹ The ancient ruins at Mitla, the great pyramid at Cholula, the fortress at Xochicalco, stone figurines, ceramic vessels and ‘hieroglyphic paintings’ (codices) alternate with ‘views’ and descriptions of a sublime and agitated nature: the Chimborazo volcano, the basaltic prisms at Santa María Regla in New Spain and the Tequendama Falls on the Bogotá River. Humboldt had first-hand knowledge of many of these objects and places; for others, he relied upon the drawings and depictions made by Creole savants or on his exchanges with local informants.

It is no accident that the Parisian album of New World curiosities opens with an engraving of the sculpture of an ‘Aztec priestess’ which Humboldt saw in the collection of Guillermo Dupaix, one of New Spain’s foremost antiquarian scholars, during his residence in Mexico City in 1803 (Figure 1). Dupaix’s ‘priestess’ reminds Humboldt of a similar ‘idol’ he collected in the ruins in Texcoco outside Mexico City and later deposited in King Frederick Wilhelm III’s collection in Berlin. But Humboldt is especially struck by the apparent resemblance between the headdress of the Aztec priestess and that of a Greek statue of Isis in the Villa Ludovisi in Rome and indeed of the heads embedded in the capitals of the columns at the Temple of Hathor at Dendera in Egypt (Figure 2), which Humboldt saw in Vivant Denon’s recently published Voyage dans la basse et la haute Égypte.² On the basis of conversations with Georg Zoëga, a scholar of ancient Egypt and curator of Mexican codices in the Borgia collection, Humboldt decides that the distinctive feature at the back of the statue’s head, which he takes to be a purse-like knot that ties her hair, resembles sculptures of Osiris. In addition, the so-called Aztec priestess’s triangular ‘skirt’, decorated with 24 symmetrically placed bells, reminds Humboldt of the robes of the ‘grand priest of the Hebrews’. To be sure, Humboldt also notes differences between the New and Old World artefacts. He notes that the string of ‘pearls’ around the head of the Aztec priestess looks nothing like the adornments of Egyptian statues; instead, they are, he guesses, evidence of commercial ties between ancient Mexico and the Californias. And the materials used for Mexican and Egyptian statues are different: the Aztec priestess is carved in ‘true’ basalt, which is black and hard, unlike porphyry, ‘which antiquarians commonly call Egyptian basalt’. Humboldt, like most other contemporary scholars of Mexican antiquities, cannot but wonder how the ancient Mexicans could have carved such a hard stone without metal tools.

What should we make of Humboldt’s orientalist reading of the ‘Aztec priestess’? Finding affinities between ancient Mexican and Egyptian artefacts falls today in the realms of pseudoscience, science fiction and fake news. During Humboldt’s lifetime and indeed into the early 20th century, however, such comparisons not only did not raise eyebrows but were de rigueur among the learned. Ancient Egypt and the Orient at large had been a point of reference for chroniclers of the New World ever since exotic artefacts from the Americas or Occidental Indies began to circulate in Europe in the 16th century. However, at the beginning of the 19th century, when Humboldt was writing his Vues, in the minds of many, several developments brought the ancient civilisations of America and Egypt even closer together.

On the one hand, quite literally, the increasing circulation and accumulation of both ancient Egyptian and Mexican objects in the same spaces of display, such as the Louvre, the British Museum or the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid, made them increasingly accessible for comparative study. On the other hand, such comparisons were taking place in the context of unprecedented popular and scholarly interest in all things Egyptian, following Napoleon’s campaigns in North Africa. Denon’s Voyage, one of the earliest reference books on ancient Egypt, now brought the zodiac of Dendera to the attention of the French public. Denon’s engravings of the zodiac became the focus of fierce controversies, which pitted supporters of the biblical narrative against those who thought the world was much older. Humboldt, who was in Paris at the time working on his Vues, apparently did not take sides in the controversies. Still, the debates found their way into his writings, especially in his comparative studies of timekeeping systems of the Old and New Worlds.

The increasing proximity of Mexican and Egyptian artefacts, however, is only part of the story of why Egypt was a recourse for studying ancient Mexico. Increasingly, it was the notion of ‘style’ and, in this case, Egyptian style which moved scholars to lump otherwise distant cultures or civilisations under one label. How did the concept of style work? How did it serve to produce knowledge about and assign value to Mexico’s ancient past?

Style, writes the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, is a category of exclusion (as in the signature style of an artist) and inclusion (as an expression of the taste that dominated a certain age, nation or civilisation). It is style as an inclusive category that most interested Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68), although his evolutionary theory of style would turn out to be rather exclusive. Winckelmann was one of the most prominent and influential thinkers of the Enlightenment on art history and aesthetics. Borrowing from contemporary thinking in natural history, Winckelmann rejected a model of the history of art centred on artist biographies or on single works of art to produce instead an evolutionary, aestheticist, object-oriented history of art that privileged ancient Greece. In Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, Winckelmann postulated that a uniform, evolutionary pattern marks the history of art, which unfolds, from origin to decline, in phases corresponding to artistic stages in the representation of the human figure.³ For Winckelmann, the Greek nude figure was a culminating moment in art history. In his scheme, Egyptian and Etruscan artefacts were imperfect preludes, while Roman sculpture was the tail end of the period, when art had reached its apogee. Winckelmann further suggested that style is shaped by climate and the political regime; hence, the history of civilisation could be read as a sequencing of styles. In short, style was in Winckelmann’s influential formula a universal material index of human progress.

In Vues des cordillères et monuments, Humboldt rehearses many of Winckelmann’s theories. Building upon Winckelmann’s idea that artistic productions are expressions of their immediate surroundings, Humboldt proposed that the ‘coarseness of style and the lack of correction’ of American antiquities were determined by climate, the physiognomy of vegetation and especially the fact that the peoples of America were at war against ‘a perennially savage and agitated nature’. In the Americas, the shape of antiquities was dictated by the massiveness and extremeness of the topography: ‘volcanoes with their craters surrounded by eternal snow … the contours of mountains, valleys with their furrowed flanks, and imposing waterfalls.’ The supposed lack of political freedom that, for Humboldt and many other European philosophes, had prevailed in the ancient Americas further helped explain why pre-Columbian aesthetics deviated ‘from the ideal artistic style, in which the Greeks have bequeathed us inimitable models’. Although he considered them to lack aesthetic value, Humboldt did not deem American antiquities to be ‘unworthy of attention’. As in Winckelmann’s evolutionary scheme, they were valuable as objects of a universal science, for, he wrote, ‘they offer to our eyes a picture of the uniform and progressive march of the human spirit’.

For Humboldt, the style of American antiquities came closest to that of the ancient Egyptians and, to some extent, to that of Mongols and Tartars. This was not simply because preconquest antiquities resembled morphologically the antiquities of ancient Egypt or China. More importantly, it was the political and religious structures expressed in preconquest antiquities that justified their being placed together with those of Egypt and the Orient. Collectively, preconquest vestiges functioned as an index of the stage of civilisation reached by America’s ancient peoples, comparable to the stage reached by the ancient Egyptians. Throughout his writings, Humboldt abstained from concluding that Mexico would have been an Egyptian or an Asian colony in the New World. For him, analogy did not mean provenance. Rather, he used analogies – of style, calendar systems or mythological, religious and political structures – to construct an evolutionary scheme for the history of mankind. Resemblances might have been vestiges of a common ‘Asian’ origin of New World civilisations, but Humboldt placed that origin very far back in time.

Many of his contemporaries, however, were distrustful of or uncomfortable with the idea that anyone, short of Aryan races, could have constructed complex civilisations or produced sophisticated objects. Turning to putative skeletal and linguistic proof, they feverishly bolstered theories of Old World colonies in the Americas in the past, while making the case that Americans (south of the US border) still needed the guidance of European powers and, increasingly, the United States, if they were to succeed in the present. By the mid 19th century, style was being wielded as justification for a new round of imperialism in Africa and Asia and of neocolonialism in the Americas.

Against such European and US cultural and political claims on Mexico’s past and present, some Mexican intellectuals took charge of preconquest antiquities to argue for their autochthonous quality. José Fernando Ramírez was one of the most vocal of them: as director of the National Museum of Mexico in the mid 19th century, he firmly maintained that Mexico’s ancient past belonged to Mexico both materially and intellectually. In the context of the French Intervention (1863–5), Ramírez was instrumental in impeding the expatriation of the national collection to the Louvre. He was also one of a handful of Mexican politicians and intellectuals to travel east across the Atlantic. There, he visited some of Europe’s most celebrated museums, including the British Museum, the Louvre, the princely collections in Berlin and the superb museum of Egyptian antiquities in Torino, and could therefore compare first-hand the antiquities of the Old World with those of the New. Upon his return to Mexico, he complained that ‘those who do not want to grant America’s unfortunate son any original thought explain the pyramids as an imitation of Egypt’.⁴ For the rest of his life Ramírez remained a staunch and mordant critic of all theories of Aryan colonies in the Americas and called for more locally sensitive approaches to the study of Mexico’s past, which would bring into play codices, chronicles, indigenous languages and toponymics. In time, Humboldt’s ‘Aztec priestess’ would come to be identified with Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of water, or with Xilonen, goddess of young corn. Both goddesses were typically represented with headdresses made of folded paper and decorated with amaranth seeds, but Xilonen was painted red, while Chalchiuhtlicue was blue. Humboldt’s ‘Aztec priestess’, now in the British Museum, still shows faint traces of red paint.

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 O. 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).

¹ A. von Humboldt, Vues des cordillères et monuments des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique (Paris: Schoell, 1810–13).

² V. Denon, Voyage dans la basse et la haute Égypte, pendant les campagnes du Général Bonaparte (Paris: P. Didot, 1802).

³ J.J. Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (Dresden, 1764).

⁴ J. Fernando Ramírez, ‘Noticias históricas y estadísticas de Durango’, Boletín de la Sociedad de Geografía y Estadística, 5 (1857), 10.