This collection of interesting and diverse essays is an important contribution to the study of ancient American art history, a field of study that has only flourished in the past fifty years.
This group of established and emerging scholars focuses on the pre-Columbian art of the Andes, the Maya, and of central Mexico. It is also a tribute to Esther Pasztory, professor emerita of art history at Columbia University, who plays a defining role in the developing discipline.
Until the 1960s, pre-Columbia art was usually lumped in with “primitive art” and largely left to archaeologists. Pasztory spent more than forty years changing that image, and today pre-Columbian art is universally recognized for its complexity and sophistication. In this volume seventeen scholars, many former students of Pasztory, tackle a wide variety of topics including the Inca and Nazca art of Peru, the art of Maya temples, and Aztec picture writing. Special attention is given to the art of Teotihuacan, the great pre-Columbian city near present day Mexico City that dominated the region from about 100 B.C. to A.D. 650 and held a population of more than 80,000 people at its peak. Study of its enigmatic murals and ceramics have led to new insights of its development.
In an afterword, Pasztory sums up the progress of pre-Columbian art studies and finds that it “can give more” because Native American art evolved entirely independent of Western assumptions of the nature of art. Realism, for example. is basic to Western art, but largely lacking elsewhere. She makes the case for the inclusion of the art of ancient America into a universal art theory.
With its twenty-seven color and 110 black and white illustrations, Visual Culture of the Ancient Americas is an outstanding commentary on the current status of pre-Columbia art history and its potential to aid the understanding of these complex societies as well as the art of the planet.
