BEIJING.- The pre-Hispanic Mayas expressed their vision of life in a rich array of materials and techniques in buildings, utilitarian objects and sumptuary pieces that bear witness to the Maya people and their relationship to the gods, daily life, writing, astronomy, music, and dance.

Maya visual art displays humanized deities, animals, plants, and supernatural beings, although the foremost subject by far is the human figure. By idealizing the human form, they revealed their conception of man and their paradigms of beauty, as well as humankind’s place in the structure of the cosmos.

In numerous artistic expressions, some displaying exquisite realism and others denoting more symbolic and personal interpretations, the Mayas captured subtle details in depicting members of society. These included facial features, body type, even deformities and pathologies, as well as different types of clothing and poses that reveal multiple activities and rank.

Through a vast collection of sculptural and ceramic art, Mayas, The Language of Beauty focuses on a fundamental aspect of pre-Hispanic visual art, the body, seen from four perspectives.

THE BODY AS CANVAS
The Mayas modified their physical appearance in many ways to express their ideals of beauty. These practices ranged from everyday hairdos and skin painting to scarification and tattoos that permanently altered an individual’s appearance as visible expressions of cultural identity or belonging to a group in society.

Facial scarification and dental ornamentation were the principal forms of personal embellishment, plus artificially modifying head shape,strabismus, and perforating the skin to wear earflares, lipplugs, and nose ornaments.

THE COVERED BODY
For the Mayas clothing signaled an individual’s social status. Most people worked the land and dressed simply: women wore a hipil and skirt or cloak, while men donned a loincloth tied at the waist and sometimes a long cloak tied at the shoulders.

The nobility used elaborate attire with accessories such as belts, necklaces, headgear, and pectorals studded with precious stones and feathers. Colorful textiles were woven with laborintensive techniques, such as brocade and drawn threadwork in addition to many others that were adorned with feathers.

THE ANIMAL COUNTERPART
The Mayas regarded animals as beings with supernatural powers capable of speaking and thinking. They recognized the differences between human and animal realms as part of a worldview based on complementary opposites: life-death, man-nature, human-animal.

According to Maya belief, the rulers strengthened their power by turning to certain otherworldly forces that enabled their wayo´ob, or souls, to leave the body at nighttime and to move about freely, converted into fantastic beings with a supra-animal appearance.

THE BODIES OF THE DIVINITY
The Mayas venerated many deities and sacred entities of a highly diverse nature. They regarded them as the origin of aweinspiring natural phenomena that struck fear in them, and the material and spiritual expression of all that exists.

Representations of deities blended human characteristics and animal, plant, or imaginary elements, the superimposition of different gods, and even their opposites. They could simultaneously be male and female, young and old, animal and human, creators and destroyers, mirroring nature itself, which served as their model.