Gold of the Indians

By ROBERT HUGHES

I do not marvel at gold and precious stones. But I am astonished to see workmanship excel the substance. For I have with wondering eyes beheld a thousand forms and similitudes, of which I am not able to write.

And in my judgment, I never saw anything whose beauty might so allure the eye of man.

Thus Peter Martyr, a Habsburg court chronicler and diplomat, greeted the Old World's first exaction upon the New: a stupendous hoard of ornaments, masks and ritual objects cast and hammered from teocuitlatl, "the gods' excrement"--as the Aztecs called gold--which Montezuma had given to the insatiable Cortes. It was shown in Europe in 1519, and nothing from it survives today. Like nearly all the gold artifacts that Spain dragged from the New World, it was melted down for bullion.

By 1650, more than 180 tons of gold objects and 16,000 tons of silver had been pumped back to Spain from the mineral veins of its colonies, altering the political balance of Europe. "It is his Indian Golde," wrote Sir Walter Raleigh of the Emperor Charles V in 1596, "that indangereth and disturbeth all the nations of Europe, it purchaseth intelligence, creepeth into Councels." Indeed, the tonnage figure is conservative. Much more was taken than the clerks recorded. And for centuries, at home as well as abroad, all was destroyed. Until quite recently, Raleigh's "Indian Golde" was still being sold under the counter to Panamanian dentists for tooth fillings. The passage from tomb to melting pot did not really end until, in the 1950s, Colombian and Costa Rican pilferers began to realize that the value of ancient gold on the art market was much greater than even its worth as metal.

Exquisite Profession. This dissolution of the art and artifacts of a whole culture to the crude denominator of bullion was especially ironic in view of the sheer multiplicity of use and image in pre-Columbian goldwork. No two figures are ever the same, and the range of imagery is as profuse as Colombian nature itself: alligators, jaguars, condors, deer, owls, lizards, macaws, and even hallucinogenic mushrooms. To the gaping Spaniards it seemed that anything, among these singular people, could be made of gold, from cooking pots to ceremonial masks and lime holders for coca chewing.

The greatest collection of such pre-Hispanic gold as survived the ravages of conquistador and tomb robber belongs to Bogota's Museo del Oro. In an effort to stem the flow of these exquisitely wrought masks, figurines, pectorals and pins out of Colombia and into foreign collections, the museum--underwritten by the national Banco de la Republica--has preserved some 20,000 pieces, dating from the end of the 1st millennium onward, since it began collecting 35 years ago. Two hundred of these are now on view, through July 28, at the Center for Inter-American Relations in Manhattan. It is a dazzling show, and not only because of its metal.

Working with stone hammers and crude huairas, or wind-draft casting furnaces, the Indian goldsmiths attained a level of technical skill that seems no less amazing today than it did in the 16th century, when that consummate metalworker Benvenuto Cellini is said to have spent weeks trying (and failing) to duplicate an Aztec fish of flexible silver plates inlaid with gold. The earlier goldworking cultures of Peru used hammered sheets as their basic material, but the Colombian artisans preferred to cast their images from gold. They were masters of the lost-wax technique, whereby a model of clay and charcoal was formed and then covered with thin sheets and threads of finely worked beeswax; this was mantled with clay and dried, then heated, so that the wax ran out of the mold and molten metal could be poured in to take its place.

Terse Shapes. The word primitive simply evaporates in the presence of a work like the Quimbaya pectoral (see color page) with its strange deity, man-bodied and bird-beaked, whose bifurcated wings of head dress echo the sweep of the gold blade beneath his feet. The sharpness of execution -- perfect corrugated threads lying in their parallel curves, the sense of exacting formal detail at every part of the design -- is formidable. Indeed, the goldworking cultures that flourished in the isolated river valleys of western Colombia from the end of the 1st millennium B.C. -- Quimbaya and Tairona, Tolima and Muisca, Narino and Calima -- shared, whatever their differences of society and religion, a superb instinct for the vital shape. Whether the object is a heart-shaped Calima pectoral with a fierce mask glaring from the center of its luxuriant curves, or a Muisca votive figure whose torso is compressed and flattened into a long triangular wedge of gold, or the magnificent Tairona pectoral with its three fierce birds' heads stabbing outward, the forms are so energetic in their stylization and so terse in their modeling that, even on this tiny scale, the pieces cease to be ornament and become sculpture.

And this is how they were meant to be seen: gold was not a means of exchange in pre-Hispanic Colombia, for its origins were held to be divine. It had not become what John Maynard Keynes called "a barbarous relic." Fort Knox and Tiffany have corrupted our responses to gold in art, but this remarkable show does at least enable one to get some sense of a culture in which the metal was not yet ruined, as a sculptural material, by its role as an economic fetish.

Robert Hughes

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