Landmark exhibition reveals splendour of the Aztecs

More than 10,000 people have bought tickets in advance for the Royal Academy's spectacular exhibition of Aztec art.

The comprehensive survey of Aztec culture is the most intellectually challenging and visually engrossing show the academy has mounted since its survey of African art in 1995.

Almost four hundred works will be displayed across the academy's 11 galleries for the show, which opens on Saturday and runs for five months.

It is an exhibition that has been waiting to be presented. Large-scale reviews of other meso-American, pre-Hispanic civilisations such as the Maya and the Olmec have already been done.

According to the exhibition's curator, Adrian Locke, the final impetus for the exhibition came from Mexico. "Since the start of Vicente Fox's presidency, Mexico has been reaching out to establish cultural connections with the West and the rest of the world," Mr Locke said yesterday. "It came about because of an invitation from Mexico to the Royal Academy to view some of the great archae-ological sites."

The academy's central gallery displays objects excavated from the Templo Mayor, which once stood in the centre of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital. The large pyramid, topped by twin shrines, was the spiritual and religious centre of the Aztec world.

But Tenochtitlan was razed after the Spanish invasion of 1521, to be rebuilt by the conquistadors as Mexico City.

The temple was thought to be beneath the new city's cathedral until 1978, when workmen uncovered a large circular sculpture of Coyolxauhqui, goddess of the moon, at a site near by.

Archaeologists dug further and found the temple itself. Many of the objects discovered are on display outside Mexico for the first time.

The greatest of these are two life-size clay sculptures. One represents a crouching warrior with his head enclosed by the beak of an eagle. The other is of Mictlantecuhtli, a "lord of death". Half flayed, with liver hanging out and ribs exposed, his long-nailed fingers claw at the air.

Four funeral braziers made from fired clay, with their painted surfaces well-preserved, which were discovered in 2000, are also on display.

But according to Mr Locke, there is more to the Aztecs than ritual violence and human sacrifice.

"That headline-grabbing notion was put about by the Spanish conquistadors," he said. "It was a way of belittling the Aztecs – they were nothing but barbarians after all, ripe for conversion by Christians."

The show aims to restore the reputation of the Aztecs. It reveals them to be accomplished three-dimensional sculptors, with an ability to render the human figure in a way that outclasses other meso-American civilisations of that period.

It also reveals the sophistication of their theology and cosmology.

The Aztecs established extensive trade networks and lived lives of efficiency. They also had a highly developed system of ritual dress, as evidenced by an exquisite feathered shield on display, depicting a water dog with the symbol of war spewing from its mouth.

Yet the civilisation lasted for only 200 years. Weakened by European diseases and unable to defend themselves against sophisticated European weaponry, they were no match for the Spaniards.

But their influence lived on. One item on display is a 16th-century Mexican bishop's mitre embellished with feather mosaics.

Aztecs is at the Royal Academy of Arts, Piccadilly, London, from 16 November until 11 April 2003.

Window on a lost world

The Aztecs rose to prominence at the start of the 14th century and came to dominate central Mexico from the Gulf coast to the Pacific for the next 200 years.

According to legend, they migrated south from Aztlan, in north-west Mexico, and settled on an island in Lake Tezcoco because of a prophecy that they would make their home where they found an eagle on a cactus.

They have since been described as the first Mexican archaeologists, because they investigated the cultures that preceded them, especially Teotihuacan and Tula, and appropriated elements to forge their own sophisticated civilisation.

Military and economic expansion created the largest pre-Hispanic empire in north America. Cities were adorned with enormous public buildings and sophisticated settlements included schools for the sons of nobility and aqueducts for fresh water. As well as being a fierce warrior race, they also appreciated fine art and design. Aztec remains include ceramics, jewellery in gold, jade and turquoise and pictures and shields decorated with coloured feathers. Illustrated books, known as codices, logged details of their rituals, their two systems of calendars and their rulers.

When Hernan Cortes led the Spanish conquest of the region in 1521, the Aztec culture was quickly subsumed into the new Hispanic empire.

For hundreds of years, highlights of the Aztec civilisation were thought lost. But in 1978 workers doing routine maintenance work at the site in Mexico Cityof Templo Mayor, principal temple of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlanin, uncovered a sculpture that was identified as an Aztec goddess, and this led to the discovery of far more extensive remains.

Louise Jury