Word: aztecs
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Cortes tricked the Aztec Montezuma by posing as Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god, and then methodically subdued the Indians with blunderbuss and broadsword. For the next 200-odd years New Spain, ruled from Mexico City but extending for a time as far as South Carolina, experienced what some historians have called a Golden Age. The Spaniards brought with them horses (but used the Indians as men of burden), wheat (the Indians still eat maize tortillas), such things as woolen blankets, armchairs, caps (for which the Indians exchanged jewels, silver, gold). The only things the Spaniards gave the Indians were smallpox...
...latest paintings of Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco. From the Huaxtec mudwork (similar to that of today's Pueblo Indians) Mexico's artists graduated to the only finished stone-carving and temple-building of the Mayas and Toltecs. When, in 1521, the Aztec empire was destroyed by the Spanish Blitzkrieg, Mexico's artists turned from feathered serpents to waxworky saints, from pyramids to tile-walled cathedrals. After the revolution of 1910 had cramped the style of the Church and had given a groping start to socialism, they turned modernistic, swiped an idea here & there from Paris...
...tentative toot. He had a horn. Perhaps he did not catch on at once, but his horn was tuned naturally to a pentatonic (five-note) scale. The Indian and his friends contrived other instruments to thump and tootle with the snail's shell. By the time the Aztec civilization was at its height, and the Spaniards arrived in Mexico, the Indians were playing teponaxtles (wooden cylinders, with tongues inside producing two different notes), huehuetls (tree-trunk drums), pipes and flutes of clay, rattles and rasps of many materials. All the Aztec instruments of definite pitch were tuned...
Last week Manhattan audiences heard something which might have been Aztec music. As a side show of the exhibit of Mexican art at the Museum of Modern Art (see p. 57), a program of Mexican music was worked out by Mexico's swart, amiable, unruly-locked Composer-Conductor Carlos Chavez. A collection of ancient instruments in the Mexican National Museum, and such tomes of conquistador times as the Codex Florentinus (a compilation of Indian folklore, with many a crude illustration-see cut), were all the proof Composer Chavez could give that his fanciful reconstruction called Xochi-pili-Macuilxochitl after...
Genuine paintings from the thirteenth through the nineteenth centuries are shown side by side with their respective counterfeits. Examples include pieces by Bellini, Raphael, Constable, Corot, Guardi, Ingres, and Durer. Egyptian, Greek, and Italian Renaissance sculpture, together with Chinese and Aztec figures in stone, complete the main body of the exhibit. Forgetting the line of demarcation which can be drawn between the false art and the true, it can be said that many of the examples shown are products of great craftsmanship and skill. The counterfeit Raphael as well as the Constable indicates that the forger can often be placed...