Noticias
As part of the Germany-Mexico Dual Year
The great exhibition The color of the gods. Polychrome in classical and Mesoamerican antiquity is opened
October 11, 2016One of the greatest encounters between Mesoamerican and Greco-Roman art that has conquered audiences in 22 countries, comes to Mexico City with the exhibition, The color of the gods. Polychrome in classical and Mesoamerican antiquity, opened the night of Monday, October 10th at the Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts.
Secretary of Culture, Rafael Tovar y de Teresa, accompanied by German ambassador Viktor Elbling; Reinhard Maiworm, director of the Goethe Institute; María Cristina García Cepeda, director of the National Institute of Fine Arts and Miguel Fernández Félix, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, presided over the opening of this great exhibition that synthesizes beauty, esthetic search, cosmogonies and artistic techniques through 66 pieces of the Greek and Roman world, and 52 of the Mesoamerican universe that are connected in the deep meanings that their cultures expressed through polychromy.
Rafael Tovar y de Teresa celebrated that as part of the Mexico-Germany Dual Year, the legacy of Mexican, Mayan, Toltec and Teotihuacan pieces dialogues with other ancient cultures in a collaboration that, through the Museo del Templo Mayor and the National Museum of Anthropology, have enriched specialist Vinzenz Brinkmann's extensive research about how ancient cultures used color.
The secretary of Culture said that the public will be able to find in this exhibition pieces whose colors come from times where there was other biological richness and that probably could not be copied in the present, however, he said, we also see unmistakeable traits in the Greco-Roman pieces like the green color brought from Egypt or the amber from Mesopotamia.
He reminded that this research about the polychrome has also given surprises in later centuries as when the restoration of the Sistine Chapel was carried out, new colors appeared, even more alive, with which Michelangelo had conceived this masterpiece of the universal art, something that also has happened with the ancient pieces studied in the present time.
"This exhibition is an unprecedented example in our country that allows us to see antiquity and art from a new perspective with common denominators. We are a world that until today has not known the polychrome sculptures and of which we almost always refer to the materials of which they are made like clay, marble, stone, but it is with recent research that all this has changed and has become richer”, Rafael Tovar y de Teresa said.
German Ambassador Viktor Elbling said that this exhibition clearly marks the way how in different cultures the polychrome defined the esthetic and beliefs of their peoples and how color became a reference to express messages related to their different ways to conceive the world.
“This exhibition is a show of friendship, but above all an approach to knowledge between cultures, so it is a privilege to present it as part of this Dual Year, as an example of the ties that connect us as a society."
During the opening tour the public could appreciate pieces such as the pulque divinity of the Templo Mayor, the marble lion of a Greek tomb from the IV century B.C.; the stone head of a girl found in a temple of Etruria, Italy, from the VI century B.C., the figure of the goddess Athena of the temple of Afaya Eginia of Greece from 480 B.C. and the piece of the Tlaltecuhtli Mexica of the late postclassic from 1487 to 1502 A.D.
It is narrated in the various sections of the museum how the scientific analysis of each piece began more than 30 years ago and include X-ray fluorescence, ultraviolet absorption spectroscopy and analysis of the pigments by diffraction, all the above to identify the composition of the colors that were used in each one and the aging of organic binders that are conserved in the time.
The exhibition The color of the gods. Polychrome in classical and Mesoamerican antiquity is presented until January 8th, 2017 in the Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts.
Mexico,Distrito Federal
