Coatlicue
About 1439 or about 1500
Two and a half metres of carved stone rise in front of you in the form of a goddess with no head. In place of a face, two serpents emerge from her severed neck and meet in profile to form a new face with fangs and forked tongues. She wears a skirt of woven snakes, a necklace of human hands and hearts with a skull at the centre, and her hands and feet end in claws. This is Coatlicue, She of the Serpent Skirt, mother of the war god Huitzilopochtli, and the most overwhelming sculpture that the Mexica left behind.
Walk around her. Every surface is carved, including the underside of the feet, where the earth god Tlaltecuhtli is cut into the stone that no living viewer was ever meant to see. The serpents that replace the head and hands stand for streams of blood, since in Mexica thought blood was the liquid that kept the sun moving. The statue is not a portrait but a diagram of the cosmos: sky serpents above, the earth's devouring mouth below, sacrifice in the middle. Note the exact, patterned carving of the feathers and scales and the way the whole mass leans slightly forward, as if she were about to step off the plinth.
The statue was found in seventeen ninety in the main square of Mexico City, a few months before the Sun Stone. The colonial authorities were so disturbed by it that they reburied it in the university courtyard, and it was dug up and reburied more than once before scholars finally kept it above ground in the nineteenth century. Some archaeologists believe it was one of a group of similar figures placed around the Great Temple. It remains the piece that visitors talk about on the way out, and its sister figure Yolotlicue, in fragments, stands nearby.
Did You Know? When the statue was first uncovered in seventeen ninety, students reportedly began leaving offerings before it, and it was reburied to stop them.
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