Peeling Back History, Layer by Layer

Faculty, Arches

The work of Puget Sound art historian Linda Williams has helped reveal the hidden truth of how art and culture evolved in the Yucatán Peninsula.

The fading, centuries-old murals on the walls of churches around the Yucatán Peninsula reflect the influence of the Europeans who landed on its shores in the 16th century. It seems only logical to assume that the images were created by the Europeans, whose arrival transformed the entire hemisphere—but that assumption is actually incorrect.

Linda Williams’ work is central to a collaborative effort that has uncovered the truth lying beneath the surface—quite literally, in this case, under peeling layers of plaster. Williams, professor emerita of art history, and her colleagues have been able to determine that the artists responsible were “largely if not exclusively Maya painters,” working under the direction of Franciscan friars, but using techniques and materials that predated the Spanish. “There was a millennia-long tradition of incredibly skilled artists who created pigment and applied it to the walls,” says Williams. Even in the face of European conquest, she says, “that didn’t die out.”

It took an interdisciplinary effort of art history savvy and high-tech analysis for Williams and her colleagues to confirm their findings. The work was propelled by a $200,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. At the heart of the project are Williams and Amara Solari, an art historian and anthropologist from Penn State; their partnership grew out of a shared interest in the cultural and artistic history of Yucatán—a region that both knew well and about which scholarship remains relatively light. Williams, who initially studied Italian art history at the University of Texas, began her immersion in colonial Mexico and the broader region with a grad school trip in 1992. “I was thinking about how I could combine my interest in the pre-Columbian past with my background in Italian art history,” she says. “The answer was the colonial period.”

More than 30 years later, she says, “There still aren’t that many of us in the field.”

Williams and her colleagues have documented and analyzed more than two dozen 16th-century murals so far, using pigment analysis and high-tech photography, among other techniques.

Williams’ and Solari’s research had overlapped here and there for a few years by 2017, when they decided to work together. Their joint project earned the NEH grant in 2019, and pulled from resources and expertise across North America. In Mexico, archaeologist Claudia García Solís of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia provided expertise with pigment samples and preservation of the invaluable cultural treasures. Penn State’s Materials Characterization Laboratory offered scientific analysis of pigment samples taken from the murals. And at Yale University, Emily Floyd of the Center for the Material and Visual Cultures of Religion, an open-access collection of images from religious archaeological sites around the world, offered gigapixel photography and an online home for everything they documented and unveiled.

What they’ve documented includes more than two dozen murals discovered so far, paintings of Christian iconography (the Virgin Mary, a range of saints, and other images essential to the faith) in vibrant colors and of varying size, on the walls of churches built primarily in the 16th century by Indigenous labor under the direction of the Spanish newcomers. Eventually most of the murals were plastered over, and only in recent decades did the plaster begin to come loose or be removed, revealing the largely intact murals to new eyes. For Williams, it was a gift, “this really marvelous, engaging, interesting, artwork from the period of contact with the Europeans.”

Mural uncovered in the Yucatan region by Linda Williams and her colleagues.

Most of the murals were plastered over, and only in recent decades have they been revealed to new eyes.

Williams cites an array of reasons why virtually no other scholars have attempted the work: a lack of archival material, difficulty in reaching isolated sites far from coastal tourism hubs like Cancún, and the difficulty of finding the murals once there. Over the course of research trips, they’ve learned to be persistent, and patient: “When we land in town, especially the really small pueblos, the trick is to find the sacristan [the person in charge of the church and its contents]—and sometimes you’ve got an audience of children very interested in someone who’s interested in their church,” she says. “But the things we’ve found just by sitting and talking with people … by the end of a trip, it’s like, ‘Oh, what’s in that room? Oh, wow, look at that, there are more murals in there.’”

A mural uncovered by Linda Williams and her colleagues in the Yucatan.

When COVID-19 greatly limited Williams’ and Solari’s ability to do archival research in Spain, they adapted by relying on domestic resources: Penn State’s materials-science expertise allowed them to definitively identify pigments via chemical analysis, and the gigapixel photography provided by the Yale collaboration allowed them to “see things that were completely unintelligible or invisible, either because of the lighting or the difficulty of reaching some of the spaces,” Williams says.

Project imagery can be found on the Yale site at mavcor.org/Yucatán_tour and the University of Texas Press is set to release Williams’ and Solaris’ book, Maya Christian Murals of Early Modern Yucatán, this year. Williams says, “We both feel really good about this project. It’s expanding the art history community—and illuminating a fascinating aspect of the history of Yucatán.”

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