A chacmool from Guácimo, Costa Rica, combines human and jaguar features and grips a bowl. The chacmools of Chichen Itza and Tula depict young men with warrior attributes, while the chacmools of Michoacán depict elderly men with wrinkled faces and erect penises. Some of the figures are richly attired whilst others are almost naked. Some chacmools were raised upon rectangular bases. The figure may be lying on its back or on its side and the abdomen can be sunken below the level of the chest and knees or at the same level. ![]() There is great variation among individual chacmools, with some possessing heads that are right-facing and others left-facing, and some with the heads facing upwards some examples have movable heads. The chacmool is a distinctive form of Mesoamerican sculpture representing a reclining figure with its head facing 90 degrees from the front, leaning on its elbows and supporting a bowl or a disk upon its chest. The chacmool form of sculpture first appeared around the 9th century AD in the Valley of Mexico and the northern Yucatán Peninsula. Their symbolism placed them on the frontier between the physical and supernatural realms, as intermediaries with the gods. Īztec chacmools bore water imagery and were associated with Tlaloc, the rain god. Chacmools were often associated with sacrificial stones or thrones. In an Aztec example, the receptacle is a cuauhxicalli (a stone bowl to receive sacrificed human hearts). These figures possibly symbolised slain warriors carrying offerings to the gods the bowl upon the chest was used to hold sacrificial offerings, including pulque, tamales, tortillas, tobacco, turkeys, feathers and incense. That eyes-right corker I’d adored since childhood, leering at the Chinese tomb guardians staring through the sun / In the next gallery back at him: the label notes / He has been “widely exhibited here and abroad” yet now / They know: not some recarving merely of the face / Or prosthetic limb to double for one broken off / One high noon of bloodlust revelry in elder Mexico / But the entire sculpture, made for market, skull to toe: An old con man craning his head over his shoulder.Maya chacmool from Chichen Itza displayed at the National Museum of AnthropologyĪ chacmool (also spelled chac-mool) is a form of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican sculpture depicting a reclining figure with its head facing 90 degrees from the front, supporting itself on its elbows and supporting a bowl or a disk upon its stomach. Can it be? The Minneapolis Chacmool, unveiled, is fake. Shortly after his unmasking, a respected poet who had grown up in Minneapolis wrote about the incident in his poem called Father and the Minneapolis Chacmool. For that matter, so does Chac Mool-as a cautionary tale, a bemusing story, his medium literally listed as “Fakes and Forgeries.” Her earrings, by all accounts, are also real and remain in Mia’s collection. She was a board member of the Friends of the Institute and the Junior League, which sponsored the children’s cruise. She was in fact briefly a stewardess for Northwest Airlines during World War II, and her affection for exotic places was genuine. She lived in Honolulu and, after 1964, in La Quinta, California, near Palm Springs. She married three times-Overstreet was the middle man-and died, just last year, as Kitty Laird. Born Katherine Mordaunt in 1919, she went by Kitty. ![]() Overstreet was real enough, though her identity changed several times as well. Overstreet…a real airline hostess,” as the caption described her-was promoting the museum’s upcoming “cruise” for Minneapolis schoolchildren, in which she would pose as their airline stewardess-guide. When this photo was taken by a Minneapolis Tribune photographer in December 1949, and run in the newspaper on January 8, 1950, Chac Mool was still very much in good standing-or reclining. “When I first saw this sculpture in storage many years ago, it seemed almost laughably bad,” she said at the time, “and now it’s hard to believe so many were taken in by it for so long.” Molly Huber, the assistant curator of the renamed Department of African, Oceanic, and Native American Art, included the sculpture in a 2010 exhibition called “In Pursuit of a Masterpiece,” as an instructive counter-example. No one else on staff, over several decades, had reason to be suspicious. The spoiler was the museum’s first curator of what was then called the primitive art department. Only in the 1970s was his true nature revealed: He was a fake, and not even a good one. Chac Mool now reclines in museum storage.
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