A Legacy of Art & Architecture

Mexico's artistic and architectural legacy reaches back more than 3,000 years. Until the conquest of Mexico in A.D. 1521, art, architecture, politics, and religion were intertwined. Although the European conquest influenced the style and subject of Mexican art, this continuity remained throughout the colonial period.

Pre-Hispanic Forms

Mexico's pyramids were truncated platforms crowned with a temple. Many sites have circular buildings, such as El Caracol at Chichén Itzá, usually called the observatory and dedicated to the god of the wind. El Castillo at Chichén Itzá has 365 steps -- one for every day of the year. The Temple of the Magicians at Uxmal has beautifully rounded and sloping sides. Evidence of building one pyramidal structure on top of another, a widely accepted practice, has been found throughout Mesoamerica.

Throughout Mexico, carved stone and mural art on pyramids served a religious and historic function rather than an ornamental one. Hieroglyphs, picture symbols etched on stone or painted on walls or pottery, functioned as the written language of the ancient peoples, particularly the Maya. By deciphering the glyphs, scholars allow the ancients to speak again, providing us with specific names to attach to rulers and their families, and demystifying the great dynastic histories of the Maya. For more on this, read A Forest of Kings (Morrow, 1990), by Linda Schele and David Freidel, and Blood of Kings (George Braziller, 1986), by Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller. Good hieroglyphic examples appear in the site museum at Palenque.

Pre-Hispanic cultures left a wealth of fantastic painted murals and cave paintings, most of which are remarkably preserved, in the central mountain region concentrated in the San Francisco de la Sierra and Santa Martha mountains. Most depict a combination of faceless human forms and animal forms, in apparent depictions of ritualistic ceremonies. Their origin remains a mystery. Over 300 cave paintings are concentrated in an area known as the Great Wall, in the San Francisco de la Sierra -- it's the largest concentration of ancient rock paintings in the world.

Spanish Influence

With the arrival of the Spaniards, new forms of architecture came to Mexico. Many sites that were occupied by indigenous groups at the time of the conquest were razed and in their place appeared Catholic churches, public buildings, and palaces for conquerors and the king's bureaucrats. In the Yucatán, churches at Izamal, Tecoh, Santa Elena, and Muná rest atop former pyramidal structures. Indian artisans, who formerly worked on pyramidal structures, were recruited to build the new buildings, often guided by drawings of European buildings. Frequently left on their own, the indigenous artisans implanted traditional symbolism in the new buildings: a plaster angel swaddled in feathers, reminiscent of the god Quetzalcoatl, and the face of an ancient god surrounded by corn leaves. They used pre-Hispanic calendar counts -- the 13 steps to heaven or the nine levels of the underworld -- to determine how many florets to carve around church doorways.

To convert the native populations, New World Spanish priests and architects altered their normal ways of teaching and building. Often before a church was built, an open-air atrium was constructed to accommodate large numbers of parishioners for services. Posas (shelters) at the four corners of churchyards were another architectural technique unique to Mexico, again to accommodate crowds. Because of the language barrier between the Spanish and the natives, church adornment became more explicit. Biblical tales came to life in frescoes splashed across church walls. Christian symbolism in stone supplanted that of pre-Hispanic ideas as the natives tried to make sense of it all. Baroque became even more baroque in Mexico and was dubbed churrigueresque or ultrabaroque. Exuberant and complicated, it combines Gothic, baroque, and plateresque elements.

Almost every major town in the Baja peninsula has the remains of a mission nearby. Many were built in the 17th century following the early arrival of Jesuit friars. Prime examples include the Misión Nuestra Señora de Loreto, the first mission in the Californias, started in 1699. The catechization of California by Jesuit missionaries was based from this mission and lasted through the 18th century. About 2 hours from Loreto, in a section of the old Camino Real used by Spanish missionaries and explorers, is Misión San Francisco Javier, one of the best-preserved, most spectacularly set missions in Baja -- high in a mountain valley beneath volcanic walls. Founded in 1699 by the Jesuit priest Francisco María Píccolo, it was the second mission established in California, completed in 1758. The original building of the Misión Santa Rosalía de Mulegé, founded in 1706 by Father Juan de Ugarte and Juan María Basaldúa, was completed in 1766, but in 1770, a flood destroyed nearly all the common buildings, and the mission was rebuilt on the site it occupies today, on a bluff overlooking the river. Although not the most architecturally interesting of Baja's missions, it remains in excellent condition and still functions as a Catholic church, although mission operations halted in 1828. Inside, there is a perfectly preserved statue of Santa Rosalía and a bell, both from the 18th century.

When Porfirio Díaz became president in the late 19th century, the nation's art and architecture experienced another infusion of European sensibility. Díaz idolized Europe, and he commissioned a number of striking European-style public buildings, including many opera houses. He provided European scholarships to promising young artists who later returned to Mexico to produce Mexican-subject paintings using techniques learned abroad.

In Baja, Díaz granted the Compañía de Boleo (part of the Rothschild family holdings) a 99-year lease to the rich deposits of copper in the area surrounding Santa Rosalía in exchange for the company building a town, the harbor, and public buildings, and establishing a maritime route between the port and Guaymas, meant to create employment for Mexican workers. The architectural influence of Santa Rosalía is decidedly European, and nowhere more so than in its church, the Iglesia de Santa Barbara, a structure of galvanized steel designed by Gustave Eiffel (of Eiffel Tower fame) in 1884. It was originally created for the 1889 Paris World Expo, where it was displayed as a prototype for what Eiffel envisioned as a sort of prefab mission. The structure eventually made its way to Santa Rosalía in 1897, where its somber gray exterior belies the beauty of the intricate stained-glass windows viewed from inside.

The Advent of Mexican Muralism

As the Mexican Revolution ripped the country apart between 1911 and 1917, a new social and cultural Mexico was born. In 1923, Minister of Education José Vasconcelos was charged with educating the illiterate masses. As one means of reaching people, he invited Diego Rivera and several other budding artists to paint Mexican history on the walls of the Ministry of Education building and the National Preparatory School in Mexico City. Thus began the tradition of painting murals in public buildings, which you will find in towns and cities throughout Mexico.