Chalchiuhtlicue, the Great Goddess of Teotihuacan
About 200 to 500
A massive standing figure, more than three metres tall, greets you in the Teotihuacan hall with a square headdress, a broad face and hands folded across the chest. Its body is a rectangular block with a skirt, a wide belt and a large tasselled ornament hanging at the front. The figure is usually called Chalchiuhtlicue, She of the Jade Skirt, the goddess of lakes and running water, although the name is a later Aztec one and the people of Teotihuacan spoke a language we cannot read.
The style is pure Teotihuacan: geometric, frontal, stripped of any suggestion of movement. Notice how the ears, the necklace and the fringe of the skirt are reduced to bands and rectangles, and how the whole figure fits within the outline of a single block. Look for traces of red pigment and for the drilled holes in the ears and headdress, where ornaments of real feathers, stone or shell were once attached. The base is carved with a simple pattern, and the figure was meant to be seen from the front, standing within a plaza rather than a room.
The statue was found near the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan, the great city that flourished north of Mexico City between the first and seventh centuries and was already a ruin when the Aztecs arrived. It was moved to Mexico City in the nineteenth century and stood for decades in the old museum on Moneda Street before the collection came here in nineteen sixty four. It introduces a hall that also holds the reconstructed facade of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent and painted murals from the city's apartment compounds.
Did You Know? The people of Teotihuacan left no readable writing, so the names we use for their gods, including this one, are borrowed from the Aztecs a thousand years later.
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