cesil\cesil\0898\itmala

We don't know if Zinedine Zidane, maker of French victory in the Football World Cup, would have the honour of a commemorative statue.
But if he was a Maya player of pelota today we would surely see somewhere his colossal stone portrait, really worthy of his unquestionable football merit. One of the most incredible article of the great exhibition on
Maya open at Palazzo Grassi is indeed the statue of a ball player, a man more than two metres high from the place of Dzibichaltn.
It won't be, certainly, the only analogy to our times which the greedy and careful visitor would look for in the 36 rooms and the 4000 square metres that, in the 17th century palace which faces Canal Grande, receive and show over twenty centuries of one of the most fascinating and mysterious civilisations of the ancient world.

For example, what did such art mean for this people arrived about 4000 years ago in Yucatàn, between Mexico, Belize and Guatemala ? It's explained to us by Monkey God, Ah Chuen, one of the many gods from the Maya Pantheon, guardian of figurative arts but even of writing and handcraft.
So a guardian of media of that times painted on the colossal pictures of kings such as on the refined pottery ornaments and the accurate calendar, astronomical and historical-ritual codes.
These last, unfortunately, reached us numerically reduced because of the merciless persecution by which the 'extirpadores de idolatras' come with European conquerors systematically destroyed artistically and cultural testimonies of the native cultures.

The translation of Maya hieroglyphics allows us to

reconstruct with sufficient reliability the costumes, the every day life of that people since the origins to colonial age.
So we can learn that their eldest cosmogony myth, connected to the Universe creation, had as its protagonist Hun Nai Ye, a young and extraordinarily handsome man who, from the Hell or Xibalbà, brings to earth the precious maize seeds by which human race will be kneaded.
]An agricultural myth, a faith born from the prolific rhythms of earth and engraved by Maya on the monuments of Copàn, Quiriguà, Bonampak and Palenque.
From Bonampak it comes one of the most

spectacular work of the exhibition, a cycle of wall pictures, rebuilt with attention, in which architectures, people and customs from the 7th century a.C. relive efficaciously, with cerimonies and rituals, battles, dramatic and whirling sacrifices.
Destined to impetrate the benevolence and the intervention of god, the human sacrifice accompanied all the history of Maya, causing bloody rituals in which also women and children died.
Connected to sacrifice was the self-mutilation, testified by impressive and suggestive founds.
Pelota game also concluded with the loser's beheading, in a dreadful allegory of the eternal fight between Nature forces. I wonder whether this ferocious ritual dozes again in the subconscious of any home supporter.

Leadership Medica^®

This pages are maintened by
GTM Grafica
Service & Network

gtmgraph@coloseum.com