A fantastical being with a human torso and bracelet-bedecked arms holds an axe in his right hand.
Otherworldly large eyes peer out from above a reptilian mouth; small curls at its edges suggest the barbels of a fish. The trunk of a tree erupts from his head.
The creature emerges from the murky depths of a watery realm, represented by a band of motifs painted with a water-laden brush.
Maya artists combined human, animal, vegetal, and mineral elements in the depiction of their gods, mining a rich body of mythological lore to visualize the gods in imaginative ways.
The figure at the center of this swirling composition is Chahk, the Rain God, wearing his characteristic diadem (a jeweled crown) and Spondylus-shell earflares.
Chahk is waist-deep in a register of “black water”: a cenote, a naturally occurring sinkhole in the karst landscape of the Maya region, considered an opening to the underworld.
Chahk’s name is spelled out beside his diadem, a sinuous shape projecting from his forehead.
The text is written in Mayan hieroglyphs, which were both pictorial and phonetic. Glyphs on this plate identify important gods, dates, events, and people.
A powerful but unpredictable god, Chahk used his axe to hurl lightning bolts to strike the earth and release new life. In a region highly dependent on rainfall for agriculture, he was—and still is—widely venerated in traditional communities.
This plate was rendered in a delicate, calligraphic style reminiscent of finely painted Maya books, its dichromatic palette of black over a cream slip broken only by the band of red on the rim.
It was a style that flourished in the late seventh and the first half of the eighth century in southern Campeche, Mexico, and northern Guatemala.
As most Maya books created before the European invasion of the Americas in the sixteenth century were destroyed in campaigns to eliminate “idolatry,” works such as this plate are reminders of a once-great scribal tradition.
Six pages from the Dresden Codex featuring eclipses (left), multiplication tables, and a flood (far right). Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons
Executed by a literate, highly educated artist, the sure lines on this footed plate reveal a mastery of slip painting—the application of a suspension of pigment and clay in water. Although this plate is unsigned, other vessels bear the name of their creators.
For a scant few generations in the Maya region, artists were recognized by name—a unique occurrence in the thousands of years of artistic production in the ancient Americas.
The Maya used the same word, tz’ihb, for both writing and painting, reflecting the close relationship between text and image.
