78
Double-headed Serpent
Mosaic-decorated figurine, from Mexico
AD 1400–1600
Any visitor to Mexico City today is likely to hear the sounds of buskers beating Aztec-style drums and wearing feathers and body paint. These buskers are not just trying to entertain passers-by: they are trying to keep alive the memory of the lost Aztec Empire, that powerful, highly structured state that dominated Mexico in the fifteenth century. The buskers would have us believe, and you can believe it if you like, that they are heirs of Moctezuma II, the emperor whose realm was brutally overthrown by the Spaniards in the great conquest of 1521.
In the course of the Spanish conquest much of Aztec culture was destroyed. So how much can we actually know about the Aztecs whom these buskers are honouring? Virtually all the accounts of the Aztec Empire were written by the Spaniards who overthrew it, so they have to be read with considerable scepticism. It is all the more important, then, to be able to examine what we can consider unadulterated Aztec sources, the things made by them that have survived. These things are the documents of this defeated people, and through them we can, I think, hear the vanquished speak.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century the Aztecs, of course, had no idea that they were on the brink of destruction – they were a young and vigorous empire triumphantly in possession of territory and trading networks that ran from Texas in the north to Guatemala in the south and included the great bulk of modern Mexico. They had a flourishing culture that produced elaborate works of art more precious to them than gold – turquoise mosaics.
When some of these mosaics and other Aztec treasures were first brought to Europe by the Spanish in the 1520s they caused an enormous stir – this was the first glimpse of a great civilization in the Americas, completely unknown to Europeans, and evidently every bit as sophisticated and luxurious as their own. This double-headed serpent is one of the most highly crafted and strangely compelling of these rare Aztec survivals.
The serpent is made out of about 2,000 small pieces of turquoise set on to a curved wooden frame, about 40 centimetres (16 inches) wide and half as high. The snake, one body shared by two heads, is in profile; the body curls up and down in a W shape, to finish at each end in a savage, snarling, head. The body of the snake is entirely in turquoise, but a brilliant red shell has been used for the snouts and the gums, and the teeth are picked out in white shell culminating in huge, terrifying fangs. As you move up and down in front of it, and let the light play over the turquoise, the changing colours seem to live, and the pieces look not so much like scales on a snake as feathers shimmering in the sunlight. It is an object which is at once both snake and bird. It is mysterious and disturbing, a work of high artifice and a vehicle of primal power. You know you are in the presence of magic.
The way that the serpent was made gives us a lot of useful information. In the British Museum’s Conservation Department, Rebecca Stacey has been examining the materials that make up the object, as well as the resins or glue that hold the 2,000-odd pieces together.
We have done a range of analyses and looked at the variety of different shells that are present. The bright red shell used on the mouth and around the nose is from the thorny oyster, which was a really highly prized shell in ancient Mexico because of this fabulous scarlet red colour and also because it involved diving to great depths. Even the adhesives, which are plant resins, were important ritual materials because they are the same materials that were used as incense and as ritual offerings – a very important ceremonial life of their own. A number of different plant resins were used: pine resin, fairly familiar, and also tropical bursera resin, which is a much more aromatic resin very much associated with incense and still used in incense in Mexico today.
So the different elements of this magical object are held together – almost literally – by the glue of faith. Rebecca Stacey and scientists across the world have established that turquoise in Aztec Mexico was transported over huge distances – some pieces were mined more than a thousand miles from the capital Tenochtitlán, now Mexico City. Goods like turquoise and the shells and resin were traded widely across the region, but it is more likely that the components of our serpent were forcibly exacted as tribute – compulsory levies from peoples whom the Aztecs had conquered. This empire had been created in the 1430s, less than a century before the Spaniards arrived, and was maintained by aggressive military power and tribute of gold, slaves and turquoise sent regularly (and reluctantly) to Tenochtitlán from the subject provinces. The wealth generated by this trade and tribute allowed the Aztecs to build roads and causeways, canals and aqueducts, as well as major cities – urban landscapes that astonished the Spaniards as they marched through the empire:
During the morning, we arrived at a broad causeway and continued our march … and when we saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great towns on dry land, we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legends of Amadis, on account of the great towers and buildings rising from the water and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream.
Turquoise was highly prized and was the focus of great rituals, designed both to impress and to intimidate – part of the ‘shock and awe’ that keeps imperial administrations in place. We know about this through the writings of Diego Durán, a Dominican friar who was extremely sympathetic to the Aztecs, learning their language and transmitting their culture and their history. So although he was Spanish we can probably rely on his account of a tribute ceremony:
People attended with their tribute of gold, jewels, finery, feathers and precious stones, all of the highest value and in great quantities … so many riches that they could not be counted or valued. All of this was done to show off magnificence and lordship in front of their enemies, guests and strangers, and to instil fear and dread.
Turquoise was also a key element in the regalia of the Aztec ruler Moctezuma II, who conducted great rites of human sacrifice wearing a turquoise diadem, turquoise nose plug and a loin cloth with turquoise beads. The two-headed serpent was almost certainly worn or carried in such a religious ceremony, perhaps even at Moctezuma’s accession to the throne in 1502. It would have held great symbolic value, not only because of its precious turquoise but also because it is fashioned as a fabulous snake. The poet and writer Adriana Diaz Enciso explains the snake’s connection to the Aztec gods, especially the great feathered serpent god, Quetzalcóatl.
The snake was important for the Aztecs as a symbol of regeneration and resurrection. In the temple of Quetzalcóatl in Tenochtitlán you can see some sculptural reliefs of snakes that are pouring water out of their mouths and the water is falling on the crops to help them grow. So it has that meaning of fertility. You see them also painted on the walls of the pyramids and the temples. The figure of Quetzalcóatl is seen in several sculptures and drawings as a snake with a body covered with feathers. The fusion of this bird, the quetzal, and the snake, which is a symbol of the earth, is a fusion of the powers of heaven and the powers of the earth, so in that sense it’s also a symbol of eternity and of renewal.
When we look again at the double-headed snake, it becomes clear that the tiny, carefully angled turquoise pieces are not far off the colour of the blue-green tail feathers of the quetzal bird, and they have been cut and bevelled to shimmer and flash just like the quetzal’s iridescent feathers. The double-headed serpent may indeed be a representation of the god Quetzalcóatl and, if so, this would link it directly to the momentous events surrounding the Spanish general Hernán Cortés’s arrival in Mexico.
Spanish accounts at the time recorded the encounter between Cortés and Moctezuma, and state that Moctezuma saw Cortés as an incarnation of the god Quetzalcóatl. Aztec legend told that Quetzalcóatl had floated out into the Atlantic and would one day return as a bearded and fair-skinned man; so, the Spanish tell us, instead of summoning his troops, Moctezuma presented Cortés w
ith the homage and the exotic gifts fit for a god. One of these was reported to be ‘a serpent wand inlaid with turquoise’. It might even have been this double-headed serpent.
We shall never know the full truth. But we do know that the Aztec tribute system was fiercely resented and led many of the subject peoples to join the Spanish invaders. Without the support of these disaffected local armies, the Spanish would never have been able to conquer Mexico. Appropriately, the double-headed serpent tells both stories. It is a document of the Aztec Empire at the height of its artistic, religious and political power; it is also evidence of the systematic oppression of its subject peoples that ultimately destroyed it. Soon Moctezuma was dead and Tenochtitlán was reduced by the Spaniards to smoking rubble. With no emperor and no capital, the Aztec empire was effectively at an end. These catastrophes were swiftly followed by the impact of devastating European diseases, especially smallpox. It has been suggested that as much as 90 per cent of the local population died within a couple of decades of the arrival of the Spaniards. Mexico would become just one important part of Spain’s vast empire in the Americas that stretched from California to Chile and Argentina – an empire, as we will see, that would have an impact beyond just Spain and the Americas.
79
Kakiemon Elephants
Porcelain figurines, from Japan
AD 1650–1700
For a large part of the world, white elephants have always been signs of power and portent. They were prized by monarchs of south-east Asia; the Buddha’s mother dreamt of one before giving birth to him. They were also a mixed blessing – as a gift from a king, they could not honourably be put to work and were horribly expensive to keep. A ‘white elephant’ has become our term for a useless extravagance. We have two almost white elephants in the British Museum. They’re perfectly useless and they’re expensive (they would have cost thousands of pounds in today’s terms) but they’re exceedingly jolly to look at, and they tell an unexpected story of the triangular power struggles between China, Japan and Korea in the seventeenth century – and of the birth of the modern multinational company.
The elephants in the British Museum were shipped to Europe from Japan sometime between 1660 and 1700. They are about the size of Yorkshire terriers, and you know they are elephants essentially because they have trunks and tusks. Otherwise they are pretty startling. The body is of white porcelain, a beautiful milky white, and over that, painted in enamel, is broad decoration – patches of red on the legs, blue patterning over the backs, which is clearly meant to represent a harness, and a primrose-yellow edged in red on the insides of the ears – which are clearly the ears of an Asian elephant. The eyes, equally clearly, are Japanese eyes. There can be little doubt that the artist who made these elephants is imagining a creature that he has never seen, and there is no doubt at all that this artist is Japanese.
Our high-spirited porcelain elephants are a direct consequence of Japan’s complex relations with her neighbours China and Korea, but they also show the impact of the close trading links between Asia and western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ever since this direct contact began, Europe has periodically been seized by a passion for the arts and crafts of Japan. It all started in the seventeenth century with a craze for Kakiemon-style porcelain, a specific technique said to have been devised by an entrepreneur potter named Kakiemon that became a traditional Japanese craft technique, passing through generations of potters. Our elephants are Kakiemon-style elephants, and they and other Kakiemon creatures rampaged decoratively over furniture and mantelpieces in the great houses of seventeenth-century Europe. One of the finest and earliest collections of these Japanese porcelain animals is at Burghley House in Lincolnshire, which also has Kakiemon elephants.
Miranda Rock, a direct descendant of the Lord Exeter who collected the porcelain, describes how he came by the objects:
This porcelain is really the success of our great collector John, the fifth Earl of Exeter, and his wife, Anne Cavendish, who were very enthusiastic Grand Tourists. We know the Japanese porcelain was here in 1688 because it is mentioned in the inventory, but we have to assume that there was a very astute dealer who John had close contact with, because there is an enormous amount of it here at Burghley and it was much in vogue at the time. And we’ve got some lovely pieces here with Japanese figures and these wonderful elephants.
We have tracked down the potter Kakiemon the 14th, who claims descent from the technique’s original creators and is today himself a Japanese Living National Treasure. He may indeed be the direct descendant of the very craftsman who decorated Lord Exeter’s menagerie around 400 years ago. He lives and works in Arita, the birthplace of Japanese porcelain, where his family have been potters for centuries:
The Kakiemon family has been making coloured porcelain in the Kakiemon style for nearly 400 years. There is plenty of porcelain stone in and around Arita that has weathered and naturally oxidized over thousands of years. The Kakiemon family has used this natural material since the Edo period. It normally takes around thirty to forty years to master the technique and acquire the skill, and training the next generation is always a big challenge.
The glaze applied to the elephants’ skin is called nigoshide. This technique was particularly developed in Arita, and we have been trying to preserve it. It’s not a pure white but a warm, milky white. I can say that it’s the starting point of the Kakiemon-style porcelain in the Edo period.
I use traditional tools. This is true of many Japanese craftsmen and keeps the traditional techniques alive. Japan has its own aesthetic and strives to maintain it. People may think that I am only following the old path, but I think my work is contemporary with traditional elements incorporated. We consider the British Museum elephants unique. I myself own one small elephant at home.
China is, as we all know, the home of porcelain and had for centuries been exporting it in industrial quantities. By the sixteenth century Europe was in the grip of porcelain mania, with a particular hunger for the famous blue and white (see Chapter 64). The appetite of the European rich was insatiable and Chinese supply struggled to keep up with demand, as a frustrated Italian merchant recorded in 1583:
Now there remain to us nothing but the leavings, for here they deal with porcelain as a hungry man with a plate of figs, who begins with the ripest, and then feels the others with his fingers, and chooses one after another of the least firm until none are left.
But new suppliers were about to enter this burgeoning market. By the fifteenth century, Korea had acquired from the Chinese the skill and the knowledge to make porcelain. It was war that spread those secrets on to Japan. In the late sixteenth century, Japan was united under a single military leader of massive ambition – Toyotomi Hideyoshi – who in the 1590s launched two attacks on Korea which he saw as mere preliminaries to taking over China from the Ming Dynasty. The takeover of China and Korea failed, but in the process Japan picked up valuable potting skills – and some of the potters who practised them – from the Korean peninsula. The Korean scholar Gina Ha-Gorlan describes the long dynamic between the three cultures:
Korea, China and Japan have kept close relationships since pre-historic times. In cultural exchanges, China often developed and advanced skills and techniques first, Korea then adopted them and then introduced them to Japan. Sampan Lee was a Korean potter who was taken from Korea to Japan during the Japanese invasion of the late sixteenth century. It’s interesting to note that this war is often referred to as the ‘potters war’, because so many Korean potters were taken to Japan in an attempt to transfer the white-porcelain manufacturing skills to Japan. So this Kakiemon elephant statue is a combination of Korean manufacturing technique, Chinese decorative skills and Japanese taste.
Around 1600 Japanese ceramics had two great strokes of luck. First there was the great boost, both in manpower and technology, given to the ceramics industry as a result of the Korean wars of the 1590s. Then, in 1644, the Ming Dynasty in China was overthrown, and in the e
nsuing political chaos Chinese production of porcelain collapsed, leaving the European market wide open. It was the perfect opportunity for the Japanese, who stepped in to take China’s place in the porcelain export business and for a brief period were able to dominate the European market. Kakiemon-style production expanded swiftly in response to European taste, creating new shapes, sizes, designs and, above all, colours, adding brilliant reds and yellows to the traditional Chinese blue and white. Europeans bought them in large quantities and, eventually, began to copy them. By the eighteenth century, Germany, England and France had all started to produce their own homegrown ‘Kakiemon’. So, in one of those bizarre and unpredictable twists of history, the first porcelain to be imitated by Europeans came not from China but from Japan.
The agent for all this, driving innovation both in Europe and in Japan, was the world’s first multinational – the Dutch East India Company, with its unparalleled concentration of resources, contacts and experience. From their magnificent new headquarters in Amsterdam, the merchants and administrators of the Company operated an ocean-spanning trading operation that for nearly a century would dominate the commerce of the whole world.
Japan was at this point being run by the Shoguns, who in 1639, to strengthen their control of the country closed off contact with the outside world. The Japanese kept open just a few carefully managed ‘gateways’, especially the port of Nagasaki, and there they allowed a few privileged states to conduct business. These states included Korea and China, and just one European partner – the Dutch East India Company. This exclusivity allowed the Company to transport Japanese porcelain to Europe in ever-growing quantities, and, as a monopoly supplier, they could charge high prices and make very large profits. The first substantial shipment from Japan, for example, arrived in Holland in 1659 and contained 65,000 items. Our elephants certainly came to Europe on a Dutch East India Company ship.
A History of the World in 100 Objects Page 44
