Maya Murals, Painting, and Iconography

Maya murals are rare. The tropical climate of the lowlands has destroyed almost every painted surface, and what survives is the residue of tombs and sealed temples that escaped the rain for a thousand years. Even so, the murals that do survive are among the most spectacular works of pre-Columbian art: the oldest of them, at the small Petén site of San Bartolo, push the tradition back to the Late Preclassic; the most famous, in three rooms at Bonampak in Chiapas, record in vivid color a Late Classic war, a royal bloodletting, and a court dance.

This page surveys Maya wall painting, the materials and techniques of Maya painters, and the iconographic program that unified murals, stelae, vases, and books into a single visual language. For the broader context, see Maya art, architecture, and monuments. For the most famous single mural program, see what the Bonampak mural shows. For the painted books, see the writing overview.

The earliest Maya murals: San Bartolo

The oldest known Maya murals are at San Bartolo, a small site in the Petén of Guatemala. Discovered in 2001 by the archaeologist William Saturno, the San Bartolo murals date to c. 300 BCE – 200 CE, in the Late Preclassic. They cover the walls of a small structure known as the Structure of the Paintings, which had been buried by a later building and survived in remarkable condition.

The most famous scene is the West Wall, which shows four richly dressed figures in a courtly procession, walking toward a great tree from which a supernatural figure emerges. The figures wear elaborate headdresses of quetzal feathers, jade collars, and belts tied in the Maya “Hunal” style. The paint is preserved in the same mineral and organic palette used by later Classic painters: red hematite, yellow limonite, black charcoal, white lime, and traces of maya blue.

A second major scene at San Bartolo, on the North Wall, shows a mythic tree at the center of a watery landscape, with gods and a richly dressed ballplayer standing beside it. The scene is read by some scholars as an early version of the World Tree that becomes central to Classic Maya cosmology and that appears in the San Bartolo ballcourt elsewhere in the same site.

The Bonampak murals

The most famous Maya mural program is the one at Bonampak, a small Late Classic site on the banks of the Lacanjá River in Chiapas, Mexico. The murals were discovered in 1946 by two young American archaeologists, Carlos Frey and John Bourne, working in the dense Lacandon rainforest; they were studied in detail in 1949 by the Mexican archaeologist Agustín Villagra Caleti and the Mexican government conservator Carlos Navarrete, who cleaned and consolidated the paintings. The site, set deep in the jungle and reachable only by a long walk from the river, has preserved its paintings in near-pristine condition.

The Bonampak murals occupy three rooms of a single small building, called the Acropolis by the Lacandon people of the area. Each room has been labeled, by the 20th-century restorers, Room 1, Room 2, and Room 3. They were painted in c. 692 CE under the rule of Janaab’ Pakal, a king of the Bonampak dynasty, and they form a single narrative program covering all four walls of the building, with subsidiary scenes on the piers and lintels.

The program is described in detail in what the Bonampak mural shows, but the basic content is:

Room 1: the presentation of nobles and the inspection of a procession of captives, the aftermath of a battle.
Room 2: a great battle scene, with hand-to-hand combat, the taking of prisoners, and the dismemberment of captives in the great plaza of Bonampak.
Room 3: a courtly dance and music celebration, with the royal family and a long line of nobles in full regalia, and the presentation of a small boy as heir to the throne.

The Bonampak murals are painted in a wide range of pigments: red hematite, yellow limonite, black charcoal, white lime, and the rare blue maya blue, a stable pigment made by bonding indigo to a clay called palygorskite. The technique was to apply a polished lime-plaster surface in multiple thin coats, paint the surface with mineral pigments bound in a stucco medium, and seal the painting with a final coat of clear stucco.

Other Classic-period mural programs

A small number of other Late Classic mural programs survive. The most important are:

Calakmul: the Structure II at Calakmul preserves fragments of a major mural program, with figures in fine polychrome on lime plaster. The site, the great rival of Tikal in the central Petén, was a major patron of painting, and the surviving fragments include processional figures and scenes of ritual.
Piedras Negras: the riverside palaces of Piedras Negras, on the Usumacinta, were once covered in murals. Most have been lost to weather, but the carved stelae and bench panels of the site preserve traces of the iconographic program.
Cacaxtla: in central Mexico, the site of Cacaxtla (which is Mixtec and Maya-influenced rather than pure Maya) preserves two major mural programs. The most famous shows a battle between bird warriors and jaguar warriors in polychrome on a brilliant red background; another shows a procession of priests in feathered headdresses. The murals are Late Classic in date and combine Maya and central Mexican iconographic elements.
Cancuén: a fragment of an earlier Bonampak-style mural program survives at Cancuén, on the Pasión River in Guatemala. The fragment is dominated by large seated figures in red and black on a yellow ground.
Palenque: the inner chambers of several major temples at Palenque, including the Temple of the Inscriptions, the Temple of the Cross, and the Palace, preserve painted stucco reliefs and polychrome detail, though the buildings are best known for their low-relief carvings rather than for full mural programs.

Painting technique

Maya murals were painted on a base of lime plaster, applied in multiple thin coats over a stone or rubble wall. The plaster was made by burning limestone in a kiln, slaking the quicklime, mixing it with sand and water, and applying it to the wall in successive layers. Each layer was polished smooth with a stone or gourd burnisher before the next was applied.

Once the final plaster coat was dry, the surface was outlined with a black line, often in charcoal, and the painter filled in the colors. The pigments were ground and mixed with a small amount of lime and water; the result was a thin, durable paint that has survived for 1,300 years. The painter then finished the work with a thin coat of clear stucco that sealed the surface and gave it a slight gloss.

The color range of Maya painting is wide. The principal pigments are:

Red: hematite (iron oxide), cinnabar (mercury sulfide, in some Late Classic uses).
Yellow: limonite and yellow ochre.
Black: charcoal, manganese, and bone black.
White: the lime plaster itself.
Blue: maya blue, an unusual pigment made by combining indigo dye with a clay mineral called palygorskite; the mixture was heated to bond the two materials into a stable compound that does not fade.
Green: a less common pigment, usually a mix of maya blue and yellow, but sometimes made from a green earth.
Purple: a rare pigment made from the murex sea snail, used in the most elaborate Late Classic programs.

Iconography

Maya iconography is a dense, recursive system. Gods are recognizable by their headdress elements, body paint, and associated glyphs. The most common figures in murals and painted vases include:

Itzamná, the primordial creator and lord of day and night, often shown as an aged god with no teeth, a large nose, and a characteristic headdress of stacked symbols.
K’uk’ulkan / Gucumatz, the Feathered Serpent, often shown with a long undulating body, a serpent head with a deer’s nose, and quetzal feathers. See K’uk’ulkan the Feathered Serpent.
K’inich Ajaw, the Sun God, often shown as a youth with a large k’in sign in his headdress and a distinctive cross-eye.
The Maize God, the most common figure in the painted codex-style vases of the Late Classic, often shown as a youthful god with a long, lobeless nose, a large ear of maize in his headdress, and an elaborate netted skirt.
The Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh, whose ballgame victories in Xibalba, the underworld, shape the foundations of Classic Maya kingship. See the Hero Twins in Maya mythology.
The Patron Gods of individual cities, such as the Principal Bird Deity of Tikal or the Storm God of Copán, each linked to a specific royal lineage.
The Vision Serpent, a flying serpent with a human ancestor or deity emerging from its mouth, conjured by royal bloodletting and the smoking of burning copal. The Vision Serpent is the signature image of the Bonampak murals and the Yaxchilán lintels.

For the religious and mythic background, see Maya religion, mythology, and cosmology.

The world tree, the four directions, and the sky band

Many Maya murals, especially in the Late Classic, are organized around a World Tree (wacah chan, “raised-up sky”), a great ceiba or kapok tree at the center of the world. The tree grows from a stylized earth sign at the base, often set in a watery landscape, and its branches reach up to a sky band populated with stars, ancestors, and the sun and moon. The four directions are represented by the colors red (east), white (north), black (west), and yellow (south), with a fifth color, green or blue, marking the center.

The sky band is a horizontal register of glyphs and small figures that runs across the upper edge of many murals. It often contains the day signs of the tzolk’in calendar, the night sky with the moon goddess, the sun, and Venus, and a long sequence of patron deities. The sky band is one of the most reliable indicators of Late Classic Maya iconographic programs and is the visual equivalent of a calendar.

Murals and the painted books

Maya murals and the painted screenfold books share a single visual language. The four surviving Maya codices — the Dresden, Madrid, Paris, and Grolier codices — are painted on bark paper in the same color palette, the same line, and the same iconographic system as the murals. The Dresden Codex, in particular, is dominated by the Vision Serpent, the sky band, the World Tree, and the almanacs that mark the Maya ritual year.

The relationship between murals, painted vases, and painted books is so close that scholars treat the three media as part of a single tradition. A codex-style vase, a Bonampak mural panel, and a page of the Dresden Codex can often be read with the same iconographic dictionary. Together, the painted works of the Maya are the most consistent body of pre-Columbian art.

Discovery and conservation

The discovery of the Bonampak murals in 1946 was a major event in Maya studies. The Mexican government dispatched a team of conservators led by Villagra to clean and consolidate the paintings, and the murals have been studied in detail since. San Bartolo was discovered in 2001, and conservation of the paintings has been a major ongoing project of the Guatemalan Institute of Anthropology and History (IDAEH) and the San Bartolo Project of the University of Pennsylvania.

Modern conservation of Maya murals is challenging: the tropical climate causes lime plaster to deteriorate rapidly once exposed to humidity, and many ancient murals are now lost to lichen, water, and root. The surviving murals are a small and precious fraction of the painted tradition, and the work of conservators, epigraphers, and iconographers continues to make them legible to modern viewers.

Sources

Miller, M. E. (1999). Maya Art and Architecture. Thames & Hudson. — link
Miller, M. E. (1986). The Murals of Bonampak. Princeton University Press. — link
Schele, L. & Freidel, D. (1990). A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya. William Morrow. — link
Houston, S. D., Stuart, D. & Taube, K. A. (2006). The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience in Ancient Mexico. University of Texas Press. — link
Taube, K. A. (2010). Maya Deities and the Place of Vision: A Workbook on Maya Iconography. Precolumbia Mesoweb Press. — link