Compelling, enlightening and appalling are all words that would be appropriate to describe the British Museum’s latest blockbusting exhibition – Moctezuma Aztec Ruler, which is on show in the historic Reading Room until 24 January.
Moctezuma reigned from 1502-1520 – at which stage he was famously deposed by Hernan Cortes and his Spanish conquistadors. His empire was a place of great artistic innovation, but it was also a place of savagery and horror. The exhibition explores both this duality and that within the character of Moctezuma himself – an all-powerful, deified, expansionist warrior who was ultimately duped and overthrown by a relatively small Spanish force.
Exhibition curator Colin McEwan says: ‘Our aim is to focus on Moctezuma in many aspects – as a politician, an administrator, a battle-hardened military commander and the head of a theocracy.’
Throughout the exhibition the emperor is referred to under his Spanish name Moctezuma, not the anglicised Montezuma. Nor is the word Aztec generally used. ‘The people that we refer to as the Aztecs never called themselves the Aztecs,’ says McEwan. ‘They called themselves the Mexica. That’s the name the Spanish would have known them by and the name from which the word Mexico derives.’
Step inside the Reading Room and some of the more alarming realities of the Mexica empire rapidly become clear. A grim-looking stone eagle with a cavity on its back would once have been a receptacle for human hearts – sliced from the chest cavities of sacrificial victims. Background sounds combine the whispering of the wind, a distant trumpet and a mournful bird cry… to add to the feeling of being atop a high temple, but also to contribute a certain tragic quality to the whole show.
To become a prisoner of the Mexica would certainly have been bad news. The people’s religion taught that the sun needed to be fed with human hearts if it was to keep rising and items on show include a drum featuring a hogtied prisoner that would have been played in the presence of captives, an evil-looking ceremonial knife with a obsidian blade and a beautiful mask of the god Tezcatlipoca which features turquoise inlaid on a genuine human skull (belonging originally to a man of about 30 years old, we are told).
The exhibition goes on to explore Mexica society and Moctezuma’s administrative innovations before turning its attention to the evil omens that were recorded as heralding the arrival of the Spanish.
What the Mexica made of the invaders we can only guess. The emperor supposedly thought Cortes was the god Quetzalcoatl come to reclaim his kingdom. A Spanish horse’s armoured headpiece, a rapier and breastplate look suitably alien and dramatic – solid and otherwordly compared to the naturalistic lines and colours of the Aztec items.
Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler is in the British Museum’s Reading Room until 24 January 2010.
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