Mural Fragment Depicting a Maguey Bloodletting Ritual
Teotihuacan (Tlacuilapaxco apartment compound, Teotihuacán, Mexico)
500–600 CE
- Medium
- Lime plaster with mineral pigment
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 63.8 × 95 cm (25 × 37 1/2 in.)
- Culture
- Teotihuacán
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Arts of the Americas
- Credit line
- Ada Turnbull Hertle Endowment Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
The ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan was once the largest city in all of the Americas. The pomp and color of this great city were expressed most distinctively through its monumental architecture. Facades of pyramids and interiors of palaces, temples, and homes were frequently decorated with splendid frescoes. The fragment shown here was part of a cycle painted on the interior walls of an aristocratic palace. It shows a rain priest walking or processing in profile and wearing an elaborate headdress and costume. His speech-scroll, adorned with seashells and plants, indicates that he is praying for water and agricultural prosperity, which were highly valued in his society.
Meaning “place of the gods,” Teotihuacan was the largest religious, military, and trading city in the Americas between A.D. 200 and 650, and it was inhabited by over one hundred thousand people at its peak. Designed with colossal pyramids and ritual plazas, the metropolis was built on a cosmologically oriented grid plan that embraced residential and manufacturing districts. This richly symbolic fragment from a Teotihuacan wall fresco depicts a ceremony that took place once every fifty-two years, a “century” in…
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
