Claudia Brittenham’s new book delves into the question of why Mesoamerican cultures produced works that often restricted or occluded the act of “seeing.” Using the monumental sixteenth-century Aztec sculpture Coatlicue as a point of departure in her introduction, she investigates not only the difficulties of seeing this work during its “life” in the sixteenth century but also after contact—it was hidden, then rediscovered in 1790, and ultimately displayed in various contexts. This “cultural biography of the object,” a term she borrows from the scholar Ivor Kopytoff, is effective in illustrating the issues of visibility and occlusion she explores. She convincingly argues that how and why works become difficult to see has much to do with how their creators and audiences understood the nature of vision.
Each chapter is dedicated to a specific Mesoamerican culture and explores ideas of visibility/invisibility. Chapter 1 focuses on the Olmec and the site of La...
University of California Press