"The Gentlings and Ancient Mexico"

The Gentlings and Ancient Mexico barbara e. mundy n the Gentling painting Eagle and Cactus (pl. 87), a Mexican eagle dominates the central field, its yellow talon grasping a writhing rattlesnake that barely avoids the spine of an adjacent nopal cactus. The precisely rendered lacustrine landscape of the Basin of Mexico, where Mexico City sprawls today, is pushed to the bottom register. While the composition and execution of the work link it to Of Birds and Texas—the best-known body of work by brothers Scott and Stuart Gentling—it is actually a piece of another important corpus, also thematically unified and intended to culminate in a lush published volume. The project’s name, One Reed Year, refers to a date in the Aztec calendar correlating to 1519, which saw the arrival of conquistadors to central Mexico and the beginning of the war of the Spanish Invasion (1519–21). The Gentlings initially envisioned the project as culminating in a book that would offer an imaginative reconstruction of what the conquistadors would have encountered when they first entered Mexico. As it turned out, the corpus of works that comprise the One Reed Year project extend well beyond the leaves of the book of the same title, which finally appeared in 2010, near the end of Scott’s life.¹ Taken as a whole, the One Reed Year project comprises works of diverse media, but all are thematically related to the art and architecture of the Aztec empire. At its core are thirteen known small-scale models of thegreat stepped pyramids that once stood in the Sacred Precinct of the capital city of Tenochtitlan—a Temple Mount to the Aztecs— mostly created by Scott and now in the Houston Museum of Natural Science (pls. 97 and 98). These were based on the “source materials, plans, maps, [and] theoretical reconstructions” that fill a series of notebooks, two of which are housed in the Gentling Papers at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.² The models, in turn, provided the inspiration for urban landscapes in a variety of media that the brothers (mostly Scott) carried out. The brothers (mostly Stuart) also created drawings, gouaches, and oil paintings of imagined Aztec domestic interiors and altars. Some of these incorporate renderings of original works of Aztec art that the brothers collected, originals that were also the subject of individual paintings and drawings. The Gentlings displayed their collection of about 200 Ancient American artworks in their gallery alongside the artworks that the collection inspired, as well as with the Tenochtitlan landscapes. I 203 The Gentlings’ interest in conquest-period Mexico was sparked by movies they saw as boys and fed by study and travel in Mexico.³ They began collecting artwork from the Ancient Americas by the late 1960s, and they began re-creating the 1519 landscapes of Mexico in the 1970s. While the One Reed Year project moved to a back burner for the brothers during the mid-1980s, when they were occupied with Of Birds and Texas, they returned to it with renewed passion in the 1990s and would continue working on it until their deaths. While always guided by the brothers’ quest for fidelity to primary sources, be they texts or artworks, the One Reed Year project inevitably was shaped by the Gentlings’ time and place. Texas’ proximity to Mexico allowed them an ease of travel, beginning as teenagers; lax restrictions on the export of Mexico’s national patrimony made collecting easy in the 1970s and 1980s; and the 1992 commemorations of Columbus’ 1492 landfall brought new public interest to the Aztecs and provided a new impetus for the brothers’ work.⁴ As artists who made a living from their work, the Gentlings tried to reach a popular audience with the One Reed Year project by having their work in films and public exhibitions. At the same time, they shared a desire to document what the Aztecs actually built with scale-model precision, and thus they carefully studied a century’s worth of previous reconstructions of Tenochtitlan done by Mexican architects and archeologists. Their research, expansive and meticulous, drawing on popular and academic sources, allowed them to claim a special authority for this work. But their re-creation of Tenochtitlan was largely an act of invention, given that the sacred architecture of the city was destroyed in the war of the Spanish Invasion. One Reed Year, then, was by nature a creative endeavor. The Gentlings’ three desires—to profit financially, to be entirely accurate in their reconstructions, and to be recognized as creative artists— were not always easily reconciled, and the tension between these competing desires runs through the long-lived project. Movies and Shifting Viewpoints Hollywood movies first piqued the interest of the twins. One was Captain from Castile, a 1947 movie they saw as boys.⁵ In it, Tyrone Power plays a Spanish nobleman, Pedro de Vargas, whose flight from the Inquisition lands him in Mexico, where he joins the invasion led by Hernán Cortés. The movie closes with a panoramic shot of the Basin of Mexico with the yet-unconquered Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan in the distance. A watercolor map of the route the conquistadors took to reach Tenochtitlan exists in the Gentling Papers (fig. 10.1) and shows the outline of central Mexico with the route marked by a thin red line. This journey held fast in the imaginations of the Gentlings for much of their lives and provided the basic structure for the One Reed Year project. They envisioned the project as a series of reconstructed landscapes of what the Spaniards saw when they arrived in Aztec Mexico. They would draw these early landscapes on long, horizontal foldout pages, some about five feet long. In Stuart’s words, one could “extend the book into long vistas, long scenes . . . [giving] you a tremendous feeling of verisimilitude [so] it really looks like, feels like, you’re there.”⁶ The brothers’ desire was to offer a near-cinematic experience. “By having something as large as this,” Stuart said, “it occupies your whole field of vision,” much like a large movie screen.⁷ In using long horizontal sheets of paper to capture the landscapes, the artists were invoking the long American tradition of the panorama, a popular entertainment of the nineteenth century, where paying publics would gather to see the slow unspooling of long rolls of paper painted with a continuous landscape, a “moving picture” well before the development of the cinematic camera.⁸ While the Gentlings never seem to have 204 fig. 10.1 Scott Gentling and/or Stuart Gentling, Ruta de Cortés de San Juan Ulúa a Tenochtitlan, n.d., graphite, ink, opaque and transparent watercolor on paper, 23 5⁄16 × 30 1⁄8 in., Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, gift of the Gentling Family, © Amon Carter Museum of American Art, A2016.019.03.10.0186. experimented with film, their painted landscapes did, in fact, lend themselves to use in cinema. When they employed a long horizontal format, the picture could hold up to a slow pan across the picture plane. And the carefully detailed depictions of objects in their works easily lent themselves to the close-up. While Captain from Castile, like other Hollywood movies of the era, lionized the Spanish conquistadors, it preserved the nobility of the Aztecs: to repay Pedro de Vargas, one Aztec warrior, Coatl, saves his life. It also featured dialogue in Nahuatl, the Aztec tongue, a language still spoken today. Stuart would reencounter Nahuatl during the spring of 1966, when he was doing a brief stint in law school at the University of Texas School of Law in Austin. Bored with classwork, he attempted to write a play about the Aztecs. Looking for sources, he encountered “an obscure nahuatl language manual in the super-rare book library at the University of Texas” and copied it by hand.⁹ The book was a practical language primer aimed at beginners, and Stuart’s copy of its grammar exercises still exists in the Gentling Papers, written in his clear hand on sheets of lined loose-leaf paper.¹⁰ The language captivated him. He began a letter to a friend in April 1966, using some of the simple Nahuatl sentences he had just learned, before switching to English: “It is a beautiful tongue, and who knows, it might even come in handy to an amateur archeologist who is ape shit over precolumbian cultures.”¹¹ Stuart’s interest in the cultures of Mexico’s indigenous peoples was in step with U.S. culture in the 1960s as intellectuals, activists, and artists looked to Native Americans for alternative lifeways. In the Gentlings’ case, a relationship with the filmmaker John Lilly Jr. was catalytic. Lilly, an American, and his French-born wife, Colette Lilly, had moved to indigenous regions in northern Mexico in 1965 and spent over two decades filming and photographing the religious life of the indigenous Wixáritari, or Huichol, people, including the ritual use of sacred hallucinogenic plants.¹² The brothers sent one of their paintings of Aztec Tenochtitlan to Lilly for inclusion in a film under development in 1981 that dealt with Aztec Mexico.¹³ Lilly responded positively, writing them that “The painting you sent has generated a great deal of enthusiasm for the Aztec part of the film.”¹⁴ The film was never made, but the brothers’ relationship with Lilly continued, and Stuart would visit the Lillys on trips to Mexico.¹⁵ While he may have witnessed the Lillys’ work with the Wixáritari firsthand, his passion was always for the Aztecs as a historical people, not a contemporary phenomenon. 205 The Gentlings’ interest in the historic Aztecs served them well when their paintings were featured in an episode of 500 Nations, an eight-part television series. 500 Nations offered a history of the Americas emphasizing the experience of its indigenous peoples. It was hosted by the actor Kevin Costner, directed by Jack Leustig, and first aired on CBS in 1995. Episode One featured at least eleven of Scott’s views of Tenochtitlan and its architecture,¹⁶ including the watercolor painting Distant View of Tlatelolco, a work that measures nearly five feet long (pl. 89). The painting adopts an oblique angle, as if the viewer were looking toward the north from the peak of the great central Templo Mayor of Aztec Tenochtitlan, which stood about ninety feet tall. Dominating the middle ground is a shallow lake within the city (a part of Mexico City known today as Lagunilla, or “little lake”), and slightly to the left of the painting’s midpoint, beyond the Lagunilla, are the pyramids of the adjacent city of Tlatelolco. The northern mountains of the Basin of Mexico form a dark belt along the painting’s middle, and above, unfurled across the top third of the work, is the blue sky dotted with clouds, some of which release rain onto the mountains below. 500 Nations made good use of the horizontal format of the Gentling painting, featuring slow pans across its surface to show the expanse of the Aztec city. The Quest for Accuracy fig. 10.2 Unknown photogra- pher, Slide of Scott’s View of Tenochtitlan (after the painting by Velasco), 1992, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, gift of the Gentling Family, © Amon Carter Museum of American Art, A2016.019.x.0010. By 1999, the aims of the One Reed Year project had shifted from capturing the inland journey of the conquistadors to a “quest to rebuild the city [of Tenochtitlan], as accurately as possible, not in the way of ordinary illustrations but something that captures the soul of the culture itself.”¹⁷ Indeed, one remarkable quality of all the Gentlings’ landscapes of the Basin of Mexico is their basis in meticulous research, which the brothers invoked to establish the authority of their work. The landscapes shared the highly naturalistic style of their other works, their chosen visual vehicle for accuracy. Rebuilding was no easy task: The architecture of the Aztecs had largely been obliterated in the sixteenth century, and by the Gentlings’ lifetime, Aztec Tenochtitlan had been covered by the sprawl of Mexico City. Pollution levels were so extreme that the mountains in Distant View of Tlatelolco would have been invisible to the Gentlings on their trips to Mexico City, as they were seen only a few hours on rare days of the year.¹⁸ Modernity denied the artists the view they wanted, so they turned to other sources to create a sense of place, the same sense of place that was so important to their paintings in Of Birds and Texas. The Gentling Papers contain sheets of transparencies, a medium favored for a color fidelity that could be lost in the printing process. One of them reproduces a painting by Scott (fig. 10.2). In it, he had copied a painting by Mexico’s most famous nineteenth-century landscape painter, José María Velasco, who painted views of the Basin of Mexico before the advent of air pollution (fig. 10.3). Velasco views the basin from the north, looking southeast to feature the two volcanoes, Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, in the background and spent volcanic cones in the middle ground. In his copy, Scott faithfully represented the surrounding mountains from Velasco, but he restored the fifty-mile-long lake 206 fig. 10.3 José María Velasco (1840– 1912), Valle de México visto desde el cerro de Guadalupe (Valley of Mexico from Guadalupe Hill), 1905, oil on canvas, 76 × 106 in., Museo Nacional de Arte, INBA Acervo Constitutivo, 1982, Reproducción Autorizada por el Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura, 2020. fig. 10.4 The foundation of Tenoch- titlan. Unknown artist (Mexica/Aztec), Codex Mendoza, MS. Arch. Selden. A. 1, fol. 2r, 1542, photo Bodleian Libraries. that had been in the valley during Aztec times, as if to turn the clock back on the landscape. This same view, with the observer oriented slightly to the south, forms the backdrop of the most iconic work of One Reed Year: Eagle and Cactus, a work that nods to Of Birds and Texas. The painting makes sly reference to the Aztecs’ own tale of origin. Setting out from the mythic homeland of Aztlan, the Aztecs wandered for years before being called by their deity to settle on the island in the middle of the lake. He sent a sign: an eagle that alighted on a cactus, a snake in its mouth. This same icon, minus the snake, lies at the center of a page in the Codex Mendoza, a book painted by Aztec artists around 1545 (fig. 10.4), and is used today on Mexico’s national flag. Even the clouds in the background were inflected by research: a transparency in the Gentling Papers from July 1994 is labeled “Clouds for Aztec Works 2” and was intended to help fill the skies of their paintings with verifiable clouds. One slide is labeled “very good, from left (dark) to right/light,” tonalities apparent in the painting Eagle and Cactus in the cloud bank to the left of the eagle (fig. 10.5).¹⁹ Much of the city that the brothers captured in Distant View of Tlatelolco would need to depend on an imagined reconstruction, given both the destruction of the conquest and the centuries of urban rebuilding and growth of Mexico City. However, Mexican archeologists had long been at work trying to understand the city’s ceremonial center, where the Aztec great pyramids once stood, and the Gentlings were eager students of archeology and architectural reconstruction of the city. For instance, Scott’s One Reed Year notebook, where he collected information and worked out his ideas about the Aztec city, opens with his hand-drawn copy of the Mexican archeologist Alfredo Chavero’s 1888 reconstruction of the Sacred Precinct.²⁰ The archive also contains an important 1935 published map of the Sacred Precinct by Ignacio Alcocer.²¹ 207 fig. 10.5 Scott Gentling and/or Stuart Gentling, [Clouds for Aztec works], 1994, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, gift of the Gentling Family, © Amon Carter Museum of American Art, A2016.019.x.0011. fig. 10.6 Mario Cirett, after Ignacio Marquina and Carmen de Antúnez, Reconstruction model of the Temple Precinct of Tenochtitlan, 1964, modified in 2015, mixed media, digital archive of the collections of the National Museum of Anthropology, Secretary of CultureINAH-MNA-CANON-MEX, reproduction authorized by the National Institute of Anthropology and History. Scott’s quest for accuracy, conveyed through pictorial naturalism, was paired with Stuart’s desire to bring the ancient city to life for modern viewers. In this, Stuart may have been influenced by the two courses in anthropology that he took during his senior year at Tulane (1964– 65). One of them, High Civilizations of Middle America, was taught by Robert Wauchope, whose vividly written book, intended to bring the discoveries of Ancient America to a broad audience, was published during Stuart’s senior year.²² Even more important to the Gentlings was the work of the Mexican architect Ignacio Marquina, whose 1951 and 1960 plans of the Sacred Precinct Scott copied into his notebook.²³ In a visit to Mexico City in 1962, Stuart witnessed Marquina’s wooden maquette of the Sacred Precinct, twenty-five square meters in size, and preserved a photograph of it.²⁴ On display since 1960, it is still a favored feature in Mexico’s Museo Nacional de Antropología and has shaped how generations of visitors have imagined the Aztec center (fig. 10.6).²⁵ Marquina, like the Gentlings, triangulated his work among available historical sources, earlier reconstructions, and known archeological finds from Mexico City’s center, and drew on a general sense of pre-Hispanic architectural grandeur to fill in areas where solid knowledge was lacking.²⁶ Like the Gentlings, he expressed his ideas in plan, in painted reconstructions, and in three-dimensional models. Scott created one maquette similar to that of Marquina (pl. 94), but he clearly took his own path in configuring the placement and scale of surrounding buildings based on his research (fig. 10.7). Marquina, for instance, set a large circular temple, the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, on the principal axis of the Templo Mayor and oriented the precinct’s ballcourt perpendicularly. Scott, on the other hand, aligned the ballcourt with the Templo Mayor’s axis, and he moved the Quetzalcoatl temple to the south and diminished its scale. As it turns out, neither Marquina nor the Gentlings were completely right or wrong regarding the core of the Sacred Precinct. In 1978, a chance discovery by 208 fig. 10.7 The Eagle gate at the south of the sacred square design by Ignacio Marquina (above) and Scott’s design from eyewitness accounts (below). Scott Gentling, Quauhquiauac Gate, “The One Reed Year” sketchbook (unpublished manuscript), ca. 2001, ballpoint pen on paper, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, gift of the Gentling Family, © Amon Carter Museum of American Art, A2016.019.03.14.010.001.16. electrical workers of an Aztec sculpture in downtown Mexico City was seized on by the archeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma to launch the most extensive Aztec excavations to date, excavations still ongoing under the direction of Leonardo López Luján. This project has revealed a circular platform (not Marquina’s high temple) in front of the Templo Mayor. The recently discovered on-axis ballcourt conforms to the Gentlings’ projection, and their skull rack, looking like a high screen, is not entirely fanciful.²⁷ But even more than proving the Gentlings right (or wrong), the new excavations reveal that current ideas of “accuracy” take their authority from the ongoing program of archeological research and scientific analysis. The authority of the amateur savant is largely a relic of the past. Collections It was not only the Aztec capital that captivated the Gentlings but also the visual qualities of Ancient American art, and the brothers built up a substantial collection of such pieces during their lifetimes. Scott in particular saw in them an expression of an organizing system of geometry. To his mind, this system derived from the “cosmic structure” of the peoples of ancient Mesoamerica (an area conterminous with central Mexico and Central America). Broadly speaking, ancient peoples believed that thirteen levels of sky and nine of underworld comprised the cosmos. This multilevel cosmos was organized into four quadrants determined by the cardinal directions. Scott saw these numerical divisions of thirteen, nine, and four, and various combinations of them, as the basis of a “secret geometry” that, in turn, guided everything from the architecture of major Mesoamerican structures to the compositions of bas-relief sculptures and painted ceramics. In one of his notebooks, which he wrote with an eye to posterity, he recorded the origins of his interest: I began my work with this subject back in the late 1960s. I had studied artists’ secret geometry as an art student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and had used it afterwards in many of my own works. Then in 1968 my brother Stuart bought a small Mayan vase with a painting of a fire priest on one side and I noticed what looked like the obvious use 209 of some kind of geometry as the basis for its composition.²⁸ fig. 10.8 Unknown artist (Maya), [Maya lord and attendant cylinder vase], late Classic Maya, 550–950 ce, earthenware with polychrome paint, height: 8 3⁄4 in., Bryce Beseth collection. That vessel may have still been in the Gentlings’ collection at the time of Scott’s death in 2011 (fig. 10.8).²⁹ A late classic (550–950 ce) Maya polychrome vessel is one of the few objects with an early identified provenance, acquired from the dealer David Howell Bramhall in the 1960s.³⁰ Ceramic slips, rather than glazes, are the colorants, yielding a palette of cream, orange tones, red-brown, brown, and black. On the narrow vertical surface of the vase, the artist shows us a scene from a Maya throne room of an unknown site. A bare-chested ruler is seated cross-legged on a low bench, facing left toward a now missing scene. His standing attendant, with arms crossed above his tied belt, flanks him at right. Both wear high, cylindrical white headdresses. Behind the attendant, a brown-red architectural support frames the figural group. The impression of proportion is evident—the vertical relation between the seated ruler and the attendant is 6:9, making it plausible that this was the vase that inspired Scott. The Gentlings’ earliest collection efforts, beginning in the 1960s, resulted in the acquisition of pieces from the Olmec (1200–300 bce) and the later Maya (300 bce–900 ce) cultures.³¹ Local collections and dealers fed this interest. The brothers reportedly bought some of their earliest acquisitions from the Black Tulip gallery, which opened in Dallas in 1963 and was owned by Everett Rassinga.³² A pilot, Rassinga is now remembered for his looting of Maya sites, stripping buildings of architectural sculpture and flying pieces out of Mexico to the United States, first by way of the commercial airlines for which he worked, and later on private planes.³³ At the time the Gentling brothers were buying from Black Tulip, the art market was unfettered by ethical concerns about collecting practices; neither were the Gentlings. Instead, early pieces appealed to them for a naturalism that reinforced their stylistic choices in their own painting practice. For instance, they bought two Maya stucco heads, and one can imagine the brothers, then young artists, being enthralled by the refined naturalism of the objects, unbothered by the lack of provenance. Their tastes were also cultivated by what they could find in their own backyard: the Dallas-Fort Worth area was distinguished then, as today, by its extensive collections of Ancient American art. Stuart knew well the Aldenhoven collection at the Fort Worth Children’s Museum (today the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History).³⁴ The Dallas Museum of Art also had, and has, a very fine collection, and its curator from 1987–93, Carolyn Tate, would become a friend and the curator of a 2003 exhibition of the brothers’ artwork.³⁵ In the 1990s, the decade when they were most involved in creating paintings and models of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the brothers’ taste shifted to art from cultures of the later postclassic (900 ce–1500 ce) period, particularly the Aztec of central Mexico and the Mixtec of southern Mexico, in the contemporary state of Oaxaca. In their documented acquisitions between 1993 and 2000, forty-five of the fifty-six pieces (or 80 percent) were Aztec or Mixtec, almost all of them bought from Sotheby’s, the major auction house selling Ancient American artworks. The brothers favored artworks related to deity cults and sacrifice 210 in this period.³⁶ For instance, Aztec and Mixtec ceramicists created distinctive hourglass-shaped drinking cups (called “pulque vessels” after the traditional beverage made of fermented maguey sap), and they typically have a range of imagery. One of the cups in the Gentling collection had “two skulls and a descending ‘eye,’ ” the other had “a good drawing of skulls.”³⁷ The collection also included two knife blades of flint or obsidian of a type found cached in the Templo Mayor, identified in the Gentling inventory as “sacrificial knives,” as well as a “pointed bloodletter with skull imagery.”³⁸ Their interest in artwork related to sacrifice or with skeletal imagery also led them to buy fakes, but this would not be revealed until after their deaths, when their collection was sold at auction. At the Gentlings’ 2002 exhibition at their Fort Worth gallery, three objects of carved crystal were on display: an eagle, a rabbit, and a skull. While the imagery is widely found in works of Aztec art, the material is not. Most, if not all, Aztec crystal skulls are now recognized as nineteenth- or twentiethcentury fakes. Their pointed bloodletter, which the Gentlings believed to have been carved from the thigh bone of an eagle, is actually the bone of a raccoon. Synergies At the 2002 exhibition, viewers could easily see a synergistic relationship between their collection of Ancient American art, Scott’s meticulous models, and the paintings. Arranged as if in the living rooms of a collector’s house, many of their small- and medium-size Aztec and Mixtec pieces were set in built-in shelving along a wall. On a small corner table, a large Aztec-period ceramic urn with pendant calla lilies and a ceramic plaque with a frontal deity figure nestled up against Scott’s model Temple of Tezcatlipoca-Omacatl (pl. 97). On the walls above the table, the brothers’ careful reconstructions of Tenochtitlan’s Sacred Precinct are hung, each with an impressive gold frame. Some of the paintings include views of the Temple of Tezcatlipoca, or colored versions of the calla lily urn, creating a system of mutual verification. The individual models, along with the larger maquette, were instrumental to Scott’s creation of the paintings, and he made hundreds of sketches of views of the models in his hand-drawn books and on translucent tracing paper, allowing ease in transfer to another drawing or onto a canvas.³⁹ This relationship between the models and a finished work is apparent in The Great Sacred Square, Tenochtitlan, a long, horizontal painting in the Houston Museum of Natural Science; it is as if the viewer were standing at a slightly elevated position within the outer wall of the maquette, looking across the ballcourt to the skull rack and the Templo Mayor beyond (pl. 90). The peaks of the volcanoes appear to the right, adding to the syncopated rhythm of the temple tops jutting into the sky. Scott would comment that the models helped him capture the shadows created by the sharp light in the built environments where white stucco dominated. And indeed, the blue-gray shadow cast along the side of the right-hand building and onto the pavement is the compositional axis of the painting, balancing the two dark colonnaded entries on the left with the more dominant one in the right foreground, as well as establishing one of the prominent orthogonals that pushes into the deep space of the painting. While Scott used the models for inspiration for his landscapes, Stuart used actual pieces in their collection for his interior scenes, like the painting The Cihuateopan, now in the Houston Museum of Natural Science (pl. 99). In it, the viewer is presented with an imagined reconstruction of an Aztec altar from the interior of one of the temples of Tenochtitlan. The viewpoint is low, as if the viewer were approaching the altar on bended knee, and the resolute symmetry of the composition is achieved not only by the exacting arrangement of the objects on and around the altar, but also by the position of the implied 211 fig. 10.9 Unknown artist (Mexica/ Aztec), Cihuateotl, 15th–early 16th centuries, stone, pigment, 26 × 17 1⁄4 × 17 in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum purchase, 1900. viewer. The bottom half of the painting is dominated by a table-like altar, draped with three decorated cloths, each with a different pattern. On the altar top are arranged five nearly identical painted stone sculptures of Cihuateteo (“female deities” in Nahuatl). The top of the altar also features another small sculpture, the head of the dog deity Xolotl, along with painted cups and low bowls, the central one holding a half-corona of fat awls used for sacrificial bloodletting. Flanking the altar on left and right are sculpted standard-bearers, painted blue, holding round fans on long poles, their large nimbuses made of purple feathers. At the top of the painting a baldachin with an elaborate border defines the top plane. It is set to align with the altar. Between the baldachin and altar, and occupying the upper half of the work, is a painting of a descending earth deity, facing frontally, with the body arranged above. At either side of the descending deity, three to a side, are descending birds and animals, painted red. In the foreground of the painting, offerings are arranged on the grassy ground, many laid out on small rectangles of decorated fabric. A dark red path leads to the altar, flanked on either side by twisted-helix garlands of pink and orange flowers. The connection to objects the Gentlings collected is evident: They owned ear spools similar to the gold ones worn by the Cihuateteo. They owned a Xolotl sculpture. The large skull vessel in the foreground is loosely evocative of several ceramic skulls in their collection, as are the pulque cups and the painted ceramic plates, tripod plates, and small bowls.⁴⁰ Stuart’s hand is visible in the decoration of the vessels, which is not drawn from the original models. Rather, it corresponds to the “theme” of the offering. For instance, in the middle offering in the foreground, the hourglass cup, the low plate, and the underlying mat are all decorated with an S-shaped motif. The S-shaped bread offerings in the plate follow suit. Beyond them, the vessel and mat are decorated with butterfly motifs, and the bread in the low plate takes the same form. The role of the five nearly identical stone sculptures that are lined up on an altar captures the competition between accuracy, creativity, and market forces in the Gentlings’ oeuvre. These female Aztec earth deities are a well-known type of Aztec sculpture, found in many collections around the world. Their inclusion adds considerably to the legibility of the work to a broader public and the potential salability of the painting. They also figure in the elaborate game of citations in The Cihuateopan: Not only did a giant Cihuateotl appear in the movie Captain from Castile, where it was fired on by Spanish cannon to prove the impotence of Aztec deities, but the Gentlings had also acquired an actual Cihuateotl figure for their collection sometime before 2002.⁴¹ As if salvaged from the movie, it was terribly damaged, with the entire face of the sculpture missing (not an unusual condition for an Aztec sculpture as these “pagan” sculptures were often used as building material and paving stones before the twentieth century).⁴² The compromised sculpture was certainly more affordable than an intact work would have been, and Scott was confident of his ability to restore ancient artworks.⁴³ Since Cihuateteo are a well-reproduced type of Aztec sculpture, Scott would have found no shortage of models for the restoration that he undertook. A canonical example of one is found in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 10.9). Carved out of fine-grained gray stone, likely from quarries in the Valley of Mexico, the kneeling deity measures twenty-six inches high and about seventeen inches across. She has her legs tucked under her and her 212 fig. 10.10 Scott Gentling, [Sketch of damaged cihuateotl sculpture, showing proposals for different position of restored face], ca. 2002, graphite on paper, 30 × 23 in., Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, gift of the Gentling Family, © Amon Carter Museum of American Art, A2016.019.10.0335. fig. 10.11 Scott Gentling and/or Stuart Gentling, [Cihuateotl sculpture after restoration], ca. 2003, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, gift of the Gentling Family, © Amon Carter Museum of American Art, A2016.019.x.0012. clawed hands raised up to her body, palms outward, to create a compact body mass in the shape of a rounded pyramid. Shallow incisions delineate the top of her wrapped skirt, her draped belt, and the divisions between thigh and calf, and between upper arm and body. In contrast, her skeletal face and clawed hands are sculpted in high relief, dominating the upper half of the sculpture as they push out of its frontal plane. Like much other Aztec monolithic sculpture, this one is bilaterally symmetrical, and regular forms dominate. Two round eyes flank a triangular nose (now damaged) and are echoed by the round ear spools on either side of the face. The exposed jaw holds bands of perfectly formed teeth, and the slightly open mouth and shadowed eye sockets add an element of vitality to the otherwise static face. The greatest liveliness comes in the carving of the hair, where the artist has delineated arching forms over the straight strands that fall to the top of her shoulders and cover the nape of her neck. The hair is not the typical coif of Aztec women. Rather, it follows the accepted convention to represent grass (malinalli in Nahuatl), which was the hair of earth deities. A sketch in the Gentling Papers, where Scott rendered the work with the care of an archeological illustrator, shows the planned restoration of the damaged sculpture (fig. 10.10). The drawing includes two proposed reconstructions of the face sketched in pencil. Scott experimented with a dramatic jut of the chin in the dotted profile but opted to restore the face along a relatively vertical plane, like that of the Met example, thereby diminishing the aggressiveness of the figure. Another photo from the archive shows the finished result (fig. 10.11), with the work of Scott’s hand melding seamlessly with that of the ancient Aztec artist. Source Materials The crowded altar in the painting The Cihuateopan offered Stuart opportunities to reproduce well-known Aztec artworks, many in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City (MNA). The authentic works by Aztec artists thus authorize the painting’s imaginative space designed by Stuart. Figure 10.12 is an annotation of the painting, identifying Stuart’s citations. The figure of the central descending deity shows something of Stuart’s method (fig. 10.13). It is largely drawn from an unusual low-relief sculpture of the deity Itzpapalotl (“obsidian butterfly”) in the MNA, which shows a frontal face at bottom with the bent arms and legs arranged in the shape of a U atop an inverted U 213 1 4 2 3 3 5 4 2 6 8 7 9 11 12 10 14 13 15 17 18 25 22 23 16 21 24 19 20 fig. 10.12 Sources for the imagery 1. Hanging streamers: Rectangular stone relief 14. Cloth with solar pattern: Platform with sun in Stuart Gentling’s The Cihuateopan depicting zacatapayolli, the grass ball of human disk in center, glyphs of the four cosmic eras in include pre- and post-Hispanic manu- sacrifice, found at Huitzuco, 38 in. (Carrasco: corners, 1200–1521, stone, 21 × 18 × 10 in., Pea- scripts and Aztec sculptures. Except as 128). body Museum of Natural History, Yale Univer- noted, the items are in the collection of the Museo Nacional de Antropología, México, and many of them have been reproduced in Davíd Carrasco and Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, Moctezuma’s Mexico: Visions of the Aztec sity, New Haven (Pasztory: plate 234). 2., 3., and 4. Relief owls, spiders, and bats: Stone 15. Incense burner bag: Unknown artists, “The of the death monsters, basalt, 26 3⁄8 × 22 × 24 ½ in. (Nicholson: 56, 57, 58). activities of the priests,” Codex Mendoza, fol. 53r. 5. Central descending figure: Itzpapalotl, the 16. Box: Details derived from the Tizoc Stone obsidian butterfly, the descending goddess of war (Carrasco: 154). and the earth, stone, 30 in. (Carrasco: 110). 17. Rattlesnake: Coiled rattlesnake, granite, 14 1⁄8 × Colorado, 1992); Henry B. Nicholson 6. Feathered fan: Fan with butterfly in center, 20 7⁄8 × 20 7⁄8 in., the British Museum, London and Eloise Quiñones Keber, Art of 1350–1521, feathers and bamboo, 46 7⁄8 × 26 ¾ in. (Nicholson: 134). Aztec Mexico: Treasures of Tenochtitlan (Pasztory: 4). 18. Skull: Modeled on ceramic skull in the Gent- (Washington, DC: National Gallery of 7. Center of feathered fan: Butterfly nose orna- ling collection. Art, 1983); and Esther Pasztory, Aztec ment, gold, 3 × 3 in. (Nicholson: 152). 19. Seat: Unknown artists, Codex Borgia, various 8. Five sculptures on altar: Cihuateotl (macabre folios, ca. 1250–1500, Biblioteca Apostolica Vati- spirit of a woman who died in childbirth), andes- cana, Rome, Italy. ite, 28 3⁄8 × 18 ½ × 16 ½ in. (Nicholson: 67). 20. Top of box: Platform with butterflies and World (Niwot, CO: University Press of Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983). 9. Hands and hearts necklace: Kneeling death symbols of sacrifice and warfare, 1200–1521, goddess (Calixtlahuaca), 1200–1521, basalt, 44 × stone, 30 ¾ × 39 in. (Pasztory: plate 238). 20 7⁄8 in. (Pasztory: plate 187). 21. Vessel: Sacrificial stone with jade glyphs, 10. Xolotl figure: Head of a monster deity 1200–1521, stone, 15 × 7 7⁄8 in. (Pasztory: plate 241). (Xolotl), andesite, 19 ¼ × 26 × 28 ¾ in. (Nichol- 22. Knife: Decorated knife, flint, shell, hematite, son 122). The Gentlings had a similar figure in and obsidian, 6 7⁄8 × 2 5⁄8 in., Proyecto Templo their collection. Mayor, Mexico (Nicholson: 40). 11. Shield with raptor foot: Unknown artists, 23. Vessels: Modeled on vessels in the Gentling “Tribute from the Quauhnahuac region,” Codex collection. Mendoza, fol. 23v, ca. 1542. Bodleian Libraries, 24. Woven box: Unknown artists, “The activities University of Oxford, Ms. Arch. Selden A1. of common people,” Codex Mendoza, fol. 58r. 12. Male holding fan: Standing male figure, 25. Kneeling jaguar: Colossal jaguar cuauhxicalli, andesite, 31 7⁄8 × 10 ¼ in. (Nicholson: 80). andesite, 37 × 89 in. (Nicholson: 30). 13. Pattern of hearts and bones on skirt: Earth monster (Tenochtitlán), 15th century, greenstone, 33 7⁄8 × 22 ½ in. (Pasztory: plates 97 and 98). (fig. 10.14). Also drawn from the MNA sculpture is the distinct rectilinear headdress framing the face, with five eagle-down balls arranged across its top. Stuart added elements that, while found in the Aztec sculptural corpus, were not part of Itzpapalotl’s attributes. The twisting hair (malinalli) and the tongue made of a flint knife come from another sculpture (fig. 10.15), as does the hair studded with banners, which comes from a sixteenth-century codex of a female earth/death deity, a Tzitzimitl (fig. 10.16). However, Stuart changed the color of the banners to red-and-white stripes, characteristic of those carried by sacrificial victims. The Tzitzimitl has a row of hands and hearts in her headdress, though their rendering in the figure in The Cihuateopan more closely aligns to those in the necklace of another Cihuateotl (fig. 10.17). Finally, emerging from the elbow joints are streams of fire and water, known from a number of sculptures and manuscripts (fig. 10.18). Fire-water (atl tlachinolli in Nahuatl) is a poetic and visual couplet that conveys the idea of “warfare.” While their trips to Mexico City would have allowed them to see the works firsthand, working in their Fort Worth studios the Gentlings had a ready-made corpus in the books in their library, part of which was auctioned off after their deaths and another part gifted by their estate to the University of North Texas at Denton.⁴⁴ In The Cihuateopan, Stuart cited many of the works that were featured in one of the first blockbuster shows of Aztec art in the United States, Art of Aztec Mexico: Treasures of Tenochtitlan, which opened in 1983 at the National Gallery in Washington, DC.⁴⁵ Another important source was Esther Pasztory’s 1983 art history survey book, Aztec Art, which was in the Gentlings’ 215 fig. 10.13 Stuart Gentling, The Cihuateopan, pl. 99, detail. library at the time of Scott’s death. Aztec Art may have been the source as well for the rare feather fan (now at the Museum für Völkerkunde, Vienna) that served as the model for the feather fans at each side of the altar in Stuart’s painting. In a clever substitution in The Cihuateopan, he swapped the feather butterfly in the center of the actual fan at the left of the painting for a more abstract gold butterfly labret, published in the Art of Aztec Mexico catalogue.⁴⁶ In The Cihuateopan, as in his paintings of Aztec interiors, Stuart also borrowed images from the codices, or painted books, created by Aztec artists both before and after the conquest. The motifs of skulls and crossbones in many of the surfaces of The Cihuateopan appear in the Codex Magliabechiano of about 1553–65 (fig. 10.19).⁴⁷ The small gold and red stool in the foreground, with its stepped legs and inset decoration of gold half spheres, three to a side, appears frequently in the Codex Borgia, a pre-Hispanic codex that the Gentlings could have known in reproduced form. Another Aztec book, the Codex Mendoza of about 1545 (fig. 10.4), includes a round shield with the image of a clawed raptor foot, the model for the shield with the claw design at the painting’s left.⁴⁸ The Codex Mendoza also represents woven reed mats and boxes being used for coverings and storage, as they are in the foreground of Stuart’s altar. Contemporary observation also left its mark on The Cihuateopan: the laying out of carefully prepared offerings (including drinks and food) on special textiles is done today in Mexico’s traditional communities, among them the Wixáritari. So is the use of brilliantly colored flowers to adorn altars—the bright orange-yellow tufted flowers that dominate the foreground represent one of the marigolds native to Mexico (Tagetes patula or Tagetes erecta), commonly called by a version of its Nahuatl name, cempoalxochitl. These have widespread use in contemporary Day of the Dead celebrations. The brothers’ inspiration may have come from visits to Wixáritari areas with the Lillys, or 216 fig. 10.14 Unknown artist (Mexica/ Aztec), Iztpapalotl, 15th–early 16th centuries, stone, approximately 14 1⁄4 × 40 1⁄2 × 40 1⁄2 in. fig. 10.15 Unknown artist (Mexica/ Aztec), Tlaltecuhtli (goddess of earth), 13th–early 16th centuries, basalt, 28 1⁄4 × 24 1⁄4 × 9 3⁄4 in. fig. 10.16 Figure of a Tzitzimitl. Unknown artist (Mexica/Aztec), Codex Magliabechiano, fol. 76r, ca. 1553–65, Courtesy of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Tourism, National Central Library, Florence. fig. 10.17 Unknown artist (Mexica/ Aztec), Cihuateotl, 15th–early 16th centuries, stone, 43 1⁄4 × 20 3⁄4 × 21 1⁄4 in. figs. 10.14 and 10.17, digital archive of the collections of the national museum of anthropology; fig. 10.15, digital archive of the collections of the temple mayor museum; secretary of culture-inah-mna-canonmex, reproduction authorized by the national institute of anthropology and history. trips in and around Mexico with their friend the artist Carmen Parra, particularly to Xochimilco, the famous “floating gardens” south of Mexico City.⁴⁹ While Stuart’s citations of authentic works attested to the accuracy of his paintings, he also transformed those works in three ways, seen in The Cihuateopan. First, he altered surface color. Originally sculptures of Cihuateteo would have been vividly painted, but little of this original paint survives on works today. Stuart took liberties with color and choice of pattern, vividly differentiating each figure with distinctive painted and gilded decoration, as in the patterned skirts and belts. The striped belt of the central figure ends in a serpent’s head, and its serpentine nature is emphasized by a live coral snake on the altar right below it, a snake that seems on the verge of slithering out 217 fig. 10.18 The atl tlachinolli symbol derived from the huehueteotl (upright drum) from Malinalco. of a low ceramic bowl. Second, he translated the image from one medium to another. He often drew on works that survived in one medium, particularly stone, and reimagined them in more ephemeral materials, like textiles, effecting a translation of media and from object to represented image. And third, he drew on contemporary observation and ethnography. The setup of the altar shows the impact of the contemporary ceremonial practices of Mexico’s indigenous peoples. The overall effect was to make the world of the Aztec seem as if it were happening right now. Public Reception fig. 10.19 Mictlantecuhtli, the death deity, on altar of crossbones and skulls. Unknown artist (Mexica/ Aztec), Codex Magliabechiano, fol. 88r, ca. 1553–65, Courtesy of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Tourism, National Central Library, Florence. Like Marquina’s work, Scott’s reconstructions and Stuart’s paintings were able to reach a broader public in the United States through museum displays and exhibitions, but they fell short of the transformative effect that Marquina’s maquette had on the public reception of the Aztecs. Certainly, that the works were featured in temporary exhibitions and visible for only a short time limited their impact. But more important was the U.S. context: Mexico’s celebration of its Aztec past is a key element of its national history, but it is not part of the United States’ national mythology. Instead, the Gentlings’ works resonated in localized contexts, where the brothers themselves could supply a narrative of their obsessive passion, and where the authority of the paintings, architectural maquettes, and drawings was attested to by two lifetimes of collecting and research. The large backlit photograph of one of Scott’s images of the Sacred Precinct, commissioned in 1998, still serves at the time of this writing as the backdrop of the Houston Museum of Natural Science’s Hall of the Americas.⁵⁰ In addition, many work are treasured items in Texas collections. Beyond this context, though, claiming authority for their works for their fidelity to Aztec sources could undercut the brothers’ position as creative artists, given the long tradition of archeological illustration, where the creative role of the maker is typically kept offstage.⁵¹ When the Denver Museum of Natural History expressed interest in borrowing some pieces for a show planned for 1992, Stuart tried to underscore their particular artistic gift, which combined specialist knowledge and artistic empathy, writing: 218 It is true that there are a number of archeologists and ethnologists who have a good idea of how the ancient city may have looked, but most of them don’t paint. And there are artists who have the skills to depict Tenochtitlan, but they do not know the archeology or social history or have the necessary empathy with the valley of Mexico. Scott and I have both. . . .⁵² QY: per CMS 13.53, an ellipse with 4 periods should not have a space before 1st period. Replace with “ . . . ” instead? In the catalogue of the show, however, their works are identified in the text as “Artist’s interpretation,” “Artist’s rendition,” and “Artist’s representation” with their names appearing only in the end matter, which the brothers considered a professional slight.⁵³ By 2001, when Scott’s model of the Templo Mayor was exhibited in The Road to Aztlan: Art from a Mythic Homeland at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), he was clearly credited as its creator. However, the Gentlings’ longtime claim to a particular artistic empathy with the Aztecs faced considerable competition in Los Angeles and across the West. For Aztlan was seen not only as a primordial homeland for the ancient Aztecs, but also for contemporary Chicanx in the United States, as laid out in Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzáles’ 1969 manifesto, “El plan espiritual de Aztlan.”⁵⁴ In the halls of LACMA, curators foregrounded works where Chicanx artists explored their cultural connections to the Mesoamerican past. The Sacred Precinct of Tenochtitlan also proved a moving target, reshaped by the discoveries being made by Matos Moctezuma and his team. Their scientific findings and conceptual models of the Aztec city had an authority that overshadowed the work of the Texan amateur savants, one of whom worked mostly while sitting in bed at home. Public fanfare around the new discoveries of Mexican archeologists sidelined an artistic project based on fidelity to historical sources and earlier archeology, now superseded. Having their own giants in Marquina and Matos Moctezuma, Mexicans had little use for strangers from the north. When, in 2000, Stuart offered a lecture at Carmen Parra’s gallery to broadcast his and Scott’s ideas about the precinct, he was received politely, but the compelling forces of archeological discovery, channeled by Mexico’s nationalistic pride in the Aztec past, had left the Gentlings and their works behind.⁵⁵ notes 1. In this essay, One Reed Year in roman face 5. They also mentioned The Royal Hunt of the refers to the larger corpus; when in italics, only Sun, a 1969 movie about the conquest of Inca Peru the published book. The Amon Carter Museum of (Stuart to [Werner Herzog], [1994], in Series 3, American Art holds two versions of One Reed [Aztec Script] Manuscript folder, Gentling Year, a boxed edition containing a somewhat Papers). inferior inkjet-printed edition of seventy-one 6. Stuart Gentling in Patsy Swank, Swank in the imperial folio sheets, unbound, along with a short Arts, July 26, 1978, transcript of KERA television, book (One Reed Year [2010], Scott and Stuart Gent- Channel 13 broadcast, in the Scott and Stuart ling Papers, Amon Carter Museum of American Gentling Research Collection, Amon Carter Art Archives [hereinafter, “Gentling Papers”]). Museum of American Art Archives. 2. One Reed Year, frontispiece. 7. Stuart in Swank, Swank in the Arts. 3. In the summer of 1961, before enrolling in 8. Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American college at Tulane, Stuart, and possibly Scott, took Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875 (New York: both elementary and conversational Spanish Oxford University Press, 1980), 20–24. courses at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios 9. Stuart to [Werner Herzog]. Superiores de Monterrey (Tulane University Record of Gentling Stuart William, in Series 9, 10. Stuart Gentling, manuscript copy of Manual Stuart’s University Transcripts folder, Gentling de la lengua nahuatl, ca. 1966, in Series 3, Nahuatl Papers). to Spanish Dictionary, Manuscript, Stuart folder, Gentling Papers. The book is Mariano Jacobo 4. Stuart Gentling to Laura Brown, registrar at Rojas y Villaseca, Manual de la lengua náhuatl; Denver Museum of Natural History, Mar. 4, 1991, método práctico para hablar, leer y escribir la uncatalogued material, Gentling Papers. 219 lengua mexicana (México, DF: J. D. Rojas, 1927). Boone ed. (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Two copies are held by the Nettie Lee Benson Research Library and Collection, 1986), 5–69. Latin American Collection library at the University of Texas, Austin. 24. Stuart Gentling, “The Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan Reconsidered” (unpublished manu- 11. Stuart Gentling to Billitzin, ca. 1966, uncata- script), n.d., in Series 3, “The Templo Mayor of logued material, Gentling Papers. Tenochtitlan Reconsidered” Manuscript folder, 12. Allegra Cordero di Montezemolo, Arden Gentling Papers. A photograph of Marquina’s Decker, and Anahí Luna, Archivo Lilly: Niérika reconstruction is also at A2016.019.10.0523 in the (exhibition text) (México, DF: Centro de la Ima- Gentling Papers. gen, 2016–17), https://centrodelaimagen.cultura 25. María Fernández, “Re-creating the Past: .gob.mx/exposiciones/2016/nierika.htmlhttps:// Ignacio Marquina’s Reconstruction of the Templo centrodelaimagen.cultura.gob.mx/exposiciones Mayor de Tenochtitlan,” in Cosmopolitanism in /2016/nierika.html. Mexican Visual Culture (Austin, TX: University of 13. John Lilly Jr. to Stuart and Scott Gentling, Texas Press, 2014), 221–73. Feb. 17, 1981, in Series 1, Correspondence, 1981 26. Fernández, “Re-creating the Past.” folder, Gentling Papers. 27. Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, Raúl Barrera 14. Lilly to Stuart and Scott Gentling. Rodríguez, and Lorena Vázquez Vallín, “El Huei 15. Arden Decker, curator, Museum of Fine Arts, Tzompantli de Tenochtitlan,” Arqueología Mexi- Houston, communication with the author, May cana 148 (Nov.–Dec. 2017), 52–57; Raúl Barrera 2019; Carmen Parra, artist, communication with Rodríguez, communication with the author, the author, May 13, 2019. Aug. 2019. 16. The connection to the film came via the 28. Scott Gentling, Sketchbook number 2, n.d. archeologist John M. D. Pohl, who did research fol. 8r., uncatalogued material, Gentling Papers. for the project. (John M. D. Pohl, “Two Artists, 29. Most of the collection (178 pieces) was sold at One Vision: The Gentling Collection of Pre- auction for a recorded total of $386,249. A number Columbian Art,” in African, Oceanic and Pre- of pieces did not sell, and the heavily restored Columbian Art: Including the Scott and Stuart Cihuateotl, discussed below, was not included in Gentling Collection [auction catalogue], Wednes- the sale. day, Nov. 12, 2014, New York, 9–11 [New York: Bonhams & Butterfields Auctioneers Corp., 2014]). 17. Tom Voight, “Deep in the Arts,” On the Record, Nov. 5, 1999, archival recording of KERA television, Channel 13 broadcast, in Series 5, the Scott and Stuart Gentling Research Collection, Amon Carter Museum of American Art Archives. 18. “Mexico City Gets Tough New Law Against Pollution,” New York Times, Mar. 25, 1971; William Stockton, “In Mexico City: Good Visibility, Bad Pollution,” New York Times, Dec. 7, 1986, section 1, 19. 19. Scott and Stuart Gentling, “Clouds for Aztec Works 2” transparency, July 1994, uncatalogued material, Gentling Papers. 20. Scott Gentling, The “One Reed Year” Sketchbook (fol. 3r), uncatalogued material, Gentling Papers. 21. Ignacio Alcocer, Plano del Centro de la Ciudad de Mexico (Tacubaya, DF: Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia, 1935), uncatalogued material, Gentling Papers. 22. Tulane University, Sophie Newcomb College for Women: Bulletin, 1964–65 (New Orleans: Tulane University, [1964]) in Tulane University Archives. The other course was “South American Indians” by Arden Ross King. 23. Published in Ignacio Marquina, Arquitectura prehispanica (México, DF: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1951) and Ignacio Marquina, Templo Mayor de México (México, DF: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 30. African, Oceanic and Pre-Columbian Art, lot number 32. 31. Only four Olmec pieces are listed in the auction catalog; two of these works, from the Samuel Dubiner collection in Israel, did not sell. 32. Christine Bertelson, “Art Dealer Braced by Nerves of Steel, Colleagues Say,” St. Louis PostDispatch, May 3, 1987. Black Tulip is listed as a source in African, Oceanic and Pre-Columbian Art. 33. Bertelson, “Art Dealer Braced by Nerves of Steel.” 34. Helmuth Naumer, executive director, Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, to Stuart Gentling, Oct. 7, 1971, in Series 1, Correspondence, 1971 folder, Gentling Papers. 35. Scott Gentling, Stuart Gentling, and Carolyn Tate, 1519/The One Reed Year: Wonders of Aztec Mexico (Lubbock, TX: The Fine Arts Galleries of the Buddy Holly Center, 2003): Carolyn Tate to Jane Day, curator of the Denver Museum of Natural History, Nov. 12, 1992, uncatalogued material, Gentling Papers. 36. “Master check list—Sept. 2002. List of art from the Gentling Collection of their exhibition: The One Reed Year” (unpublished manuscript), 2002, uncatalogued material, Gentling Papers. 37. Only one of these pulque cups appears in the Bonham auction catalog (African, Oceanic and Pre-Columbian Art, lot 67). 38. African, Oceanic and Pre-Columbian Art, lot 101. 1960). They appear on 5r (1951) and 6r. See Eliza- 39. The Gentling Papers contain hundreds of beth Hill Boone, “Templo Mayor Research, 1521– these sketches. Scott Gentling in Voight, “Deep 1978,” in The Aztec Templo Mayor, Elizabeth Hill in the Arts.” 220 40. African, Oceanic and Pre-Columbian Art, see 46. Nicholson and Quiñones Keber, Art of Aztec lot 53 for skull. Mexico, 152–53. 41. A drawing of the Cihuateotl before restoration 47. Zelia Nuttall, The Book of the Life of the is dated in pencil 14 May 2002 (uncatalogued Ancient Mexicans, Part I—Introduction and fac- material, Gentling Papers). simile (Berkeley: University of California, 1903, 42. A photograph taken around 2002 shows the reprinted 1983). entire front of the face and the hands missing, 48. Frances F. Berdan and Patricia Rieff Anawalt, resulting in a relatively planar front surface eds., The Codex Mendoza, 4 vols. (Berkeley: Uni- (uncatalogued material, Gentling Papers). versity of California Press, 1992), 19. 43. There appears to be no record of what they 49. Carmen Parra, communication with the paid for the work, but intact works are quite author, Sept. 13, 2019. See also undated sketch of valuable. For instance, a twenty-inch stone sculp- Xochimilco, uncatalogued material, Gentling ture of a female Aztec deity (Chalchiuhlicue) with Papers. an impeccable provenance, having been owned 50. Truett Latimer, president, Houston Museum by important owners and exhibited and published of Natural Science, to Scott Gentling, Feb. 25, widely, sold at Sotheby’s in 2007 for $1,216,000 1998, uncatalogued material, Gentling Papers. (African, Oceanic and Pre-Columbian Art, May 17, 51. Joanne Pillsbury, ed., Past Presented: Archae- 2007 (New York: Sotheby’s, 2007), lot 239, http:// ological Illustration and the Ancient Americas www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2007 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2012). /african-oceanic-and-pre-columbian-art-n08320 52. Gentling to Brown. /lot.239.html.) 44. Some of their general pre-Columbian books 53. Jane Stevenson Day, Aztec: The World of and books on the Ancient Maya were sold at the Moctezuma (Niwot, CO: Denver Museum of Natu- 2014 Bonham’s auction (African, Oceanic and ral History, 1992); Tate to Day. Pre-Columbian Art, lots 174–75). 54. Constance Cortez, “The New Aztlan: Nepantla 45. Henry B. Nicholson and Eloise Quiñones (and Other Sites of Transmogrification),” in The Keber, Art of Aztec Mexico: Treasures of Tenoch- Road to Aztlan: Art from a Mythic Homeland, titlan (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 358–73, Virginia M. Fields, ed. (Los Angeles: Los 1983). A crucial piece of evidence for this as the Angeles County Museum of Art, 2001). main source comes in a very unusual white flint 55. Invitation to “El Plano de Templo Mayor de knife, painted with red stripes, that appears in Tenochtitlan Reconsiderado,” Nov. 16, 2000, in the offering bowl at the bottom of the image. This Series 3, “The One Reed Year,” Clippings and piece had been excavated between 1978–82 at the Promos [2] folder, Gentling Papers. On polite Templo Mayor, and the Art of Aztec Mexico cata- reception: Carmen Parra, communication with logue was its first publication in English and the the author, Sept. 13, 2019. first in color. 221