Review - Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler at the British Museum

Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler is the last in the British Museum’s series of history’s great rulers, which started with Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, and his sell-out Terracotta Army in 2008, and having travelled Westward round the globe and 1700 years in time, ends in 1520, with the Spanish conquest of Moctezuma’s empire. Although the short-lived Aztec nation was born and extinguished during the period of the European Renaissance, Western historiography has tended to portray it was the last ‘ancient’ civilization – a tendency that the exhibition makes apparent, began almost immediately after the Spanish conquest, with imperial portraits portraying Moctezuma in the role of ‘noble savage’, simultaneously Europeanised and aesthetically exoticised into a symbol of a lost world that would appeal to European eyes.

If the positioning of Moctezuma as the last in a line of Ancient world emperors, a problem that a finite four-part series dealing with such an infinite topic as empire was bound to face, does little to question this, one of the most fascinating and valuable facets of this exhibition is that it seeks to interrogate this Westernised viewpoint by juxtaposing Aztec and Spanish artifacts and historical documents. This suggests alternatives to the famous story that we think we know – for example, whilst the official story of Moctezuma’s death has him fatally injured when stoned by his own people, indigenous Mexican sources contain a picture of him with a recognizably Spanish-looking sword sticking out of his back. Thankfully, the British Museum’s curators are too good historians to simply replace one narrative with another, but let both sit uneasily alongside one another, inviting and encouraging the visitor to question the motives behind why each wanted to portray Moctezuma in a certain way.

This is one of the difficulties and points of interest of the exhibition: it may be arranged around the figure of Moctezuma, but it is practically impossible to access the man himself except through highly biased and politicized representations from one side or the other. In certain details, the fact that he chose the symbol of kingship as his own personal symbol, rather akin to Julius Caesar taking on the name of Caesar as his own, and in his naive acceptance of Cortes, a personality convinced of his own right and righteousness seems to shine through, and as such, he appears an unlikable yet tragic figure, so obviously, to our Western eyes, sowing the seeds of his own destruction. But that is as far as we can go with Moctezuma as a man – he is too shrouded in myth and too culturally remote to be comprehensible. As for portraits, which so often give us a feeling (even if false) of intimacy: the Spanish portraits are so blatantly fictionalised (in some, Moctezuma is indistinguishable from his Spanish conquerors) and the Mexica (which is, despite the exhibitions title, apparently what we should be calling them, Aztec being a misnomer – albeit a misnomer probably now too ingrained to dispel) don’t seem to be particularly interested in individual personalities, their art being more focused on the symbolic. Moctezema’s face is indistinguishable; he is identified only by his symbol, the symbol of Kingship. He is a King, not a man.

And as a king, in relation to his kingdom, he is fascinating, and it is as a king that he provides structure to the exhibition – his reign provides the perfect focus and narrative to explore Aztec civilization and its extinction. And as a civilisation, it is profoundly disturbing. As Laura Cumming has put it so brilliantly in her Observer review

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/sep/20/moctezuma-aztec-ruler-review): ‘this is a culture of blood and rock’. The blood pours from enormous stone monuments - their pictorial depiction of their temples has a stream of blood running from each door – The BM has been accused of underplaying the bloodthirstiness of the empire, although gore on this scale probably speaks for itself. It is a culture of war and death: their earth god is imagined as an enormous pair of jaws stretched open around the surface of the earth, demanding human nourishment. Most of their gods seem to relate to war, all are fanged, and the walkway entrance to the sacred square in the middle of their city was lined with skulls. Even in small details - a pair of goblets depicts skulls with purple blotches, which the explanative caption informs us represent the remnants of the victim’s flayed skin - these artifacts are permeated with violence. Aztec human sacrifice is often anaesthetised, kept from being questioned by the sense that we, with our Western ethical and societal codes, could never understand such an alien culture. This is true, and this sense of disconnectedness shines through this exhibition, but, faced with the violent relics of a violent empire, one cannot help but think that the Mexica nobility, savage imperialists as they were, differed only from their Spanish conquerors in martial equipment and guile. Morally, they were their equals.

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