Chacmool
[1] The chacmool form of sculpture first appeared around the 9th century AD in the Valley of Mexico and the northern Yucatán Peninsula.
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.
[4] A wide variety of materials were used to sculpt chacmools, including limestone and hard metamorphic and igneous rock types.
The term chacmool is derived from the name "Chaacmol," which Augustus Le Plongeon in 1875 gave to a sculpture that he and his wife Alice Dixon Le Plongeon excavated within the Temple of the Eagles and Jaguars at Chichén Itzá in 1875; he translated Chaacmol from Yucatecan Mayan as the "paw swift like thunder.
"[5] Le Plongeon believed the statue, which he had found buried beneath the Platform of the Eagles and the Jaguars, depicted a former ruler of Chichen Itza.
"[6] Le Plongeon sought permission from Mexico's president to display the statue at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, a request that was denied.
Weeks later Yucatán turned over the statue to the federal government, which brought it to Mexico City to the National Museum of Anthropology.
[9] Although the name chacmool was inappropriately applied, it has become a useful label to link stylistically similar sculptures from different regions and periods without imposing a unified interpretation.
[17] This is the only fully polychrome chacmool that has been recovered anywhere;[17] it had an open mouth and exposed teeth and stood in front of the temple of Tlaloc, the Aztec rain god; its sculpted bowl probably received heart and blood sacrifices.
[4] During the 1930 excavation of Templo Mayor, the only fully polychrome chacmool to be found at that site was in its original context on the top level of the Tlaloc side (the rain god) of the temple.
Archaeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma posits that this mirroring confirms his interpretation that the chacmool acted as an "intermediary between the priest and the god, a divine messenger," in the same way the sacrificial stone on the Huitzilopochtli side does.
[25] The pigment that remained on this chacmool sculpture was crucial to its identification, as it does not contain any sculpted iconography or symbols associated with the rain god Tlaloc.
[26] Characteristics such as the "chia circles on the cheeks, the circular gold pectoral medallion, and the color combination of the petticoat, as well as the black skin, the red hands and feet, and the white headdress and bangles" echo the iconography of other depictions of Tlaloc.
[27] The chacmool holds onto a cuauhxicalli vessel that is engraved with the face of Tlaloc, including the same rectangular eye and mouth features.
They suggest that the pendant was looted from a Maya site, probably "from a stone vessel interred behind a chacmool" and that "its subject is probably the enthroned, resurrected Maize God.
[32] The first interpretation is that the chacmool is an offering table (or tlamanalco) to receive gifts such as pulque, tamales, tortillas, tobacco, turkeys, feathers and incense.
[34] The backward reclining figure of the chacmool presents a defenceless, passive appearance and has been likened by Miller to the positioning of captives in Classic period Maya sculpture and painting.
Eduard Seler commented in the early 1960s that chacmools in Chichen Itza tended to be located in temple antechambers, where the bowl or disc gripped by the figure served to receive pulque as an offering.
[15] The original chacmool described by Le Plongeon in the 19th century included small images of the central Mexican deity Tlaloc on its ear ornaments.
[16] The lack of the representation of chacmools in Central Mexican codices has led to them being associated with a great variety of deities by scholars, including Cinteotl, Tezcatzoncatl and Tlaloc.
The aquatic imagery carved onto the underside of some of the figures symbolised that they were floating on water, on the frontier between the physical world and the supernatural realm.
The short story "Chac Mool" by Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes is found in his book Los días enmascarados (The masked days), published in 1954.
According to the author, this short story was inspired by news reports from 1952 when the lending of a representation of the Maya rain deity to a Mexican exhibition in Europe had coincided with wet weather there.
[41]In Henry Moore's early examples of monumental reclining figures, the artist relied on the cast of a chacmool sculpture he saw in Paris.
Commenting on the major impact chacmool sculpted figures had on his early career, Moore stated that "Its stillness and alertness, a sense of readiness – and the whole presence of it, and the legs coming down like columns" were characteristics that inspired his creations.
