Teotihuacán Murals

7/17/2023

Beatriz de la Fuente
Teotihuacán Murals Museum
San Martín Centro, Mexico

Excerpts from an article on Atlas Obscura at:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/beatriz-de-la-fuente-teotihuacan-murals-museum

The pigments used to color Teotihuacán murals were sourced mostly from semi precious stones and earth; hematite produced a startlingly bright red, malachite an emerald green, and azurite a deep blue.

One of the many well-preserved wall murals of Teotihuacan. https://www.latinamericanstudies.org/teotihuacan-murals.htm

ELABORATE MURALS ONCE TATTOOED THE walls of thousands of residential complexes across ancient Teotihuacán. Today, many of them live in an unassuming museum within the archaeological site: The Beatriz de la Fuente Teotihuacán Murals Museum. Named after Mexican art historian Beatriz Ramírez de la Fuente, the museum houses over fifty millennia-old murals along with several artifacts recovered from on-site temples and palaces.

Teotihuacan fresco. Museo Nacional de Antropologia. Ciudad de Mexico

The museum consists of nine main rooms, each with its own thematic focus, spanning space and time. Within the murals, the real and the fantastical merge; a feline donning a feathered headdress sticks out a forked tongue and magnificent birds release fountains of water from their beaks. Human-like figures appear throughout the museum, too, some mortal and others deities.

The passage of time, closely linked with astronomical observation, is a recurring theme across murals and artifacts throughout the museum. A small monolith believed to have been used to keep track of time and solstices can be found toward the center of the museum. Two ceramic jars, along with eighteen obsidian blades and a human femur, found in an astronomical observation cavern are also on display.

https://www.picfair.com/pics/06542777-wall-mural-of-jaguar-palace-of-tetitla-teotihuacan-archeological-zone

Wall Mural of Jaguar, Palace of Tetitla, Teotihuacan Archaeological Zone, UNESCO World Heritage Site,
State of Mexico, Mexico, North America

Know Before You Go
The museum is open to the public Tuesday through Sunday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The fee for general admission, which includes entrance to the archaeological zone, is 80 pesos.

3 Comments

Scott Maxwell

7/17/2023 05:50:30 pm

Damn, those are beautiful. I can only imagine what they must've looked like when they were new.

Lois Zander

7/18/2023 06:12:38 am

I am drawn to Mexican Art. I found this article to be most interesting in regard to the use of materials whose color has lasted for such a long time.
The Anthropologist Museum in Mexico City is a favorite of mine as well.

Roberto A. Quintana

7/18/2023 12:28:10 pm

@ Scott and Lois:
I am currently reading: ‘Mexican and Central American Mythology’ by Paul Hamlyn.
The Toltec culture in Teotihuacan on the Mexican plateau, the site of the great pyramids and many wall paintings from palaces and priest’s dwellings, grew out of the earlier Olmec cultures (prior to 400 BCE) and flourished around 300 CE.
The Toltec culture represents the peak of a long development of art and architecture, and whose myths, religions and philosophy probably go back several centuries or more to earlier Nahua-speaking cultures in the highland valleys of central Mexico and the Maya in the Yucatan, who both had glyph writing.

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