Magazines - Tribal Art  

By Antonio Aimi, journalist specializing in the cultures of ancient Mesoamerica.

Introduction
Several decades after the Conquest, in Comentarios Reales de los Incas, Garcilaso de la Vega el Inca described the buildings and temples of Cuzco: In every house, one could find gardens and orchards for Inca recreation. They planted all sorts of beautiful and stunning trees, flower beds, and gracious and aromatic plants; in fact, all the sorts that were in their kingdom, reproduced in gold and silver, life-size, whether large or small, with all their leaves, flowers, fruits: those that were beginning to bud, others that were almost mature, and still others that were fully grown …
There were animals large and small, also cast of gold and silver, like rabbits, mice, lizards, snakes, butterflies, foxes, mountain cats, as they didn’t have domestic ones … There were birds of every kind … deer and daims, lions and tigers [i.e., pumas and jaguars], and all living animals, walking or flying, that inhabited the earth.

Nearly all these artworks were melted down in Cajamarca on July 25, 1533. Many of those that were saved were sent to Spain and disappeared after the fire at the Spanish royal seat of El Escorial in 1671. Despite this great loss, we can get a sense of the splendor of the imperial palace of Cuzco when a museum or exhibition is rich enough in gold that it reaches such a critical mass which allows entry into the world described by Garcilaso. The role of gold is sometimes downplayed by politically correct academics, in part because—quite possibly correctly—they worry that archaeology will be transformed into some sort of treasure hunt. Because of their intrinsic appeal, these finds are almost regarded more as jewelry than as scientific evidence. This prejudice is defied by the exhibition Inca: origine e misteri delle civiltà dell’oro (Inca: Origins and Mysteries of the Civilization of Gold) at the Museo di Santa Giulia in Brescia, Italy, which will be on view until June 27, 2010. This installation successfully marries two objectives that can be seen as contradictory: to show the splendor of Peru as described by Garcilaso while also creating a scientifically rigorous exhibition that illuminates a major technology of pre-Hispanic cultures. Traversing the exhibit is to see the sky of Peru as Atahualpa saw it on November 15, 1532, a few hours before being captured.