The Jaguar and the Feathered Serpent

In 1980 The National Gallery of Victoria was presented with a collection of Pre-hispanic art from Mexico and Guatemala by generous support of a group of Melbourne donors. As this exhibition shows, we now have a strong representation of the earliest pre-classic cultures from Central Mexico; the Olmec or ‘mother culture’, Xochipala, Tlatilco, Mezcala and Guerrero, with four aesthetically significant monumental sculptures from classic to post classic time periods, representative of Veracruz, Maya, Toltec and Aztec cultures.

The powerful stone monuments and ceramic sculptures reflect a feeling for order and exact proportion, the real mania for ritual, of a ceremonial society without dissipating into the decorative or the trivial.

Mesoamerican cultures remained stone age civilizations, without bronze or iron and never discovered the pottery wheel yet their ceramic and stone sculpture is imbued with a power which Roger Fry described as a ‘terror of the spiritual forces of nature’. The iconography of Mexican art is dominated by emblems of power, the jaguar and the feathered serpent, who are seen in many guises, architectural, sculptural and glyphic.

The title of this exhibition pays homage to two powerful Mesoamerican deities, the jaguar and the feathered serpent. These symbols of supernatural forces dominate the iconography of the art of Mexico and Guatemala from pre-classic to post classic time periods. The jaguar deity has an almost obsessional fascination for Olmec artists, also evident in other pre-classic cultures, but in classic and post classic cultures the feathered serpent becomes the central artistic and religious emblem.

Sourced from: The Jaguar and the Feathered Serpent: Pre-Hispanic Art of Mexico and Guatemala, NGV