In the USA, the year 2024 witnessed a remarkable efflorescence in the exploration of pictorial narratives. On the east coast, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian hosted a still ongoing exhibition (until 2026) titled Unbound: Narrative Art of the Plains, which brought together marvelous things such as historical hides and ledger books historiating, often with poignancy and vibrant detail, seminal moments in the struggling collective lives of numerous Native nations. The exhibit also includes specially commissioned contemporary works in the same tradition or inspired by these pictorial accounts. This output can be compared in style, form, syntax and ekphrastic power to ancient Mediterranean works that have been hailed as formative cornerstones in the history of Western art (for example by the Dipylon Painter). Close and attentive scrutiny of each item in this show, however, reminds viewers that such concepts as Greek priority collapse when one is confronted with the realization that pictorial narrative has been a universal expressive medium of the Homo Sapiens for a long time. It would seem that storytelling in images is one of these inexhaustible skill sets that has always helped humanity propel itself dynamically forward in a chaotic cosmos.
This realization seems to have been a fundamental premise behind the conceptualization and implementation of an equally marvelous show on the western coast of the USA. Titled Picture Worlds: Storytelling on Greek, Moche, and Maya Pottery (April 10 to July 29, 2024 at the Getty Villa; September 14 to December 15, 2024 at the Carlos Museum), this exhibit, organized at the Malibu villa by the Getty Institute’s David Saunders (a Greek iconography specialist) and Megan E. O’ Neil (a Maya specialist at Emory), brought together ceramic vessels of past peoples, whose pictorial messages resonate with the same poignancy and vibrant detail as the pictorial works of the Native nations in Washington, D.C. I would dare propose that the two shows speak to each other no less eloquently than the polyphony of the artifacts in the Getty show. Tuning in our eyes and ears to what they have to say takes effort but is inarguably rewarding.
The book reviewed here was produced to accompany the exhibition at the Getty. It is not an exhibition catalog proper but a comparative handbook, a scholarly companion carefully put together by experts, that enables interested readers to tune into the worldviews encoded on the surfaces of the exhibited artifacts. Of course, each and every artifact on display at the Getty show can be viewed on purely aesthetic terms—the Moche pictorial media are no less inviting than the familiar forms of Attic vase painting or the incomparably polychromatic Maya narratives. However, the show tellingly argues that despite the nearly unbridgeable gaps of temporal and cultural distance, we can still sensitize ourselves, albeit at a rudimentary level, to the artfully inflected narrative modes of the Maya, Moche and—the more familiar to BMCR readership—Greeks. On the surfaces of these artifacts, we can hear the Greek epics, marvel at the cosmic adventures of the Moche heroes, or delve into fundamental percepts of Maya beliefs.
Like the show, the book is premised on the comparative method. The exposition, however, is largely paratactic: after an introduction that explicates aims, methods, and premises, the learned essays instruct us about historiography, cultural background and the fundamentals of the Greek artifacts (24–39; unfortunately restricted largely to the Attic black-figure and red-figure output), then of the Moche (42–57; mostly stirrup-spout vessels), and finally of the Maya ceramic vessels (60–77; again mostly pictorial cylinder vessels). All three traditions have been irreparably damaged by non-systematic or illegal looting, but recent scholarly and other advances partially make up for the inevitable loss of archaeological information. Only after induction to this background, a more synthetic essay, characteristically titled “Understanding the imagery” (80–101, by the two editors and Andrew Turner, a Moche specialist) braids together various methodological insights that seem to be convincing in implying that the pictorial software results in modes of narrating that are common in the story-telling kits of all three cultures. The book concludes with specialized analytical essays on specific themes in Greek, Moche and Maya cultures. All of them showcase how iconographic analysis has worked to illuminate intended meanings, latent structures of thought, and the communicative function of these pictorial works.
Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell surveys the Trojan war in characteristic works ranging from Protoattic (7th c. BCE) to red-figure vases (5th c. BCE), while meditating on various modes of rendering pictorially complex episodes (e.g. synoptic, also prevalent in Moche and Maya iconographies)—we know they are complex because we have literary texts that provide a compass for reconstructing action in time and place. The contrast with the methodologies and approaches to Moche pictorial works is evident given the lack of understood texts in this culture. Julio Rucabado Yong, a curator of pre-Columbian art at the Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru, focuses on the so-called Wrinkle Face hero of Moche iconography from the tail end of long efforts to reconstruct in a coherent whole the narrative cycles, undoubtedly epic in character, of densely excerpted episodes on stirrup-spout vessels or other media. For those accustomed to Greek pictorial storytelling, both formal language and expository syntax of the Moche is challenging, but attentive looking is rewarded as the richly textured adventures of Wrinkle Face and Iguana, his likeable companion, emerge vividly on the surfaces of these incomparably animated ritual vessels. Like Maya scholarship, the Moche analytical method relies heavily on rollout drawings, many of which illustrate the essays in this volume. They are instructive and make possible further contrasts or comparisons which cannot be dealt with here. However, no less than the rollout photographs of Maya vases amply used in this book, the drawings may be misleading as the materiality and physicality of the vessels themselves determined how the stories came to life as the vases were handled in ritual or everyday settings. Finally, Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos, a Maya specialist at Yale, focuses on the so-called Vase of the Paddlers, an indisputable technical achievement of the vase-painter’s art, now in the Museo Popol Vuh in Guatemala City. Rendered in a light-on-dark technique reminiscent of the Attic red-figure one, the images focus on three seminal episodes of the death and rebirth of the Maize God (from the jaws of a serpentine monster). Unfortunately, the accompanying inscriptions (“glyphs” in Maya studies) can only go so far to illuminate underlying ideas which are unattested in later texts like the Popol Vuh. Chinchilla Mazariegos shows how these limitations can be overcome by putting to work a combination of archaeological, art historical, and ethnographic methods.
Much shorter essays introduce the mythology and iconography of seminal characters of Greek, Moche, and Maya imagination. Satyrs (Greek), Lima Bean Warriors who fight as valiantly as the well-known Greek heroes (Moche), and wayob shape-shifting creatures that functioned as companion spirits of individuals or groups (Maya) played important roles in the three conceptual universes represented in this book. They provide welcome and instructive foils to the grand narratives (Troyan War, Wrinkle Face, Maize God) of the longer essays.
A set of color images of major items on display in the exhibit concludes the hefty apparatus of the book. They do not do justice to the opportunities this little gem of a show offered to its visitors for interacting with original artifacts or for even handling replicas that enabled viewers to have more tactile sensorial experiences of these pictorial narratives. Despite these limitations, the book is a wonderful tool for an intercultural exploration of three rich artistic traditions and their picture worlds. To Greek specialists it offers a manual which facilitates breaking out of our disciplinary cocoons to enrich ways of looking and understanding a past that will never be fully graspable. This is important given that Greek studies have long dwelled in splendid isolation, shunning the rich potential offered by systematically exploring the Greeks side-by-side with visual and material cultures across the globe. I conclude expressing the wish that the Getty or other institutions continue exploring further similar intercultural forays in the future. This book and the exhibition it accompanied exemplify how this can be done successfully.
Authors and Titles
Introduction, Megan E. O’Neil, David Saunders, and Andrew D. Turner
Modern histories of ancient vases, Megan E. O’Neil and David Saunders
MAKERS AND USERS
Greek
Ancient Greece, 700-323 BCE: an overview, David Saunders
Greek painted pottery: production and use, David Saunders
Athenian figured pottery at home and abroad, Kathleen M. Lynch
Moche
The Moche, 200-850 CE: an overview, Ulla Holmquist
Moche ceramics: artists, workshops, and techniques, Andrew D. Turner
Uses and users of Moche painted vessels, Jeffrey Quilter
The warrior duck of Huacas de Moche: funerary rituals and the mastery of Moche potters, Elena Vega and Carlos Rengifo
Maya
The Late Classic Maya, 550-850 CE: an overview, Megan E. O’Neill
Maya vase production and use, Megan E. O’Neill
Maya gift giving, Stephen D. Houston
STORIES AND PICTURES
Understanding the imagery, David Saunders, Megan E. O’Neill , and Andrew D. Turner
The Trojan War, Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell
Satyrs, Guy Hedreen
The adventures of Wrinkle Face, Julio Rucabado Yong
Violent legumes, Joanne Pillsbury
The journey of the Maya maize god, Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos
Wayob as symbols of collective identity and power, Iyaxel Cojti Ren
Postscript, Megan E. O’Neill and David Saunders