PORTFOLIO FIG. 1 (above): The only known surviving image of Frederick Catherwood, a tiny selfportait 142 detail in one of his engravings. Detail of Plate 24 from Frederick Catherwood, Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, London, 1844. Image courtesy of the Mortimer Rare Book Room, Neilson Library, Smith College. FIG. 2 (near right): Idol at Copán. Detail of Plate 1 from Frederick Catherwood, Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, London, 1844. Image courtesy of the Mortimer Rare Book Room, Neilson Library, Smith College. Frederick Catherwood and the Rediscovery of the Maya The height of Maya civilization was a distant memory by the time of the fi rst contact between Europe and Mesoamerica. Spread across modernday Guatemala, Belize, southern Mexico, and western Honduras and El Salvador, the remains of their vast stone cities were still prominent landmarks at that time. More than three centuries later, a series of publications by John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood fi nally began to accurately document these remarkable monuments. Stephens and Catherwood were not the fi rst to describe Maya sites. The earliest accounts were by early Catholic missionaries, the most notable being that of Bishop Diego de Landa, who wrote a detailed account around 1566 of Maya history, religion, and culture. Between 1584 and 1589, Franciscan friar Antonio de Ciudad Real traveled throughout New Spain, including the Maya region, and made extensive notes of his observations. A secular visit to the ruins of Copán was made by Diego García de Palacio in 1576, and he left a detailed if speculative account of them, associating them with ruins found in Yucatan and Tabasco. The fi rst systematic documentation work was done by architect Antonio Bernasconi at Palenque in 1784–85. Following several other offi cial surveys, the Irish-born governor of Petén, John “Juan” Galindo, led an expedition in 1834 that touched a number of Maya sites, including Copán. Amid all this activity, Stephens and Catherwood were distinguished less by their discoveries than by their extensive documentation, and, even more so, their ability to market their fi ndings to a wide audience. They also diverged from the perspective of many nineteenthcentury commentators, who attributed the great art and architectural works of the ancient Americas to lost tribes from Europe or Egypt, or to peoples of sunken continents such as Atlantis or Mu. By Jonathan Fogel Frederick Catherwood was born in London on February 27, 1799. After an architectural apprenticeship, he enrolled in a Royal Academy art program. Inspired by the drawings of Giambattista Piranesi, he went to Rome in 1821 and traveled throughout Italy and Sicily, sketching architecture and ancient ruins. In late 1822 he moved on to Greece to do the same but was hindered by the Greek War of Independence and subsequent civil wars. He escaped Greece in 1824, traveled in native dress to Cairo, and sailed up the Nile as far as Nubia, documenting the ancient ruins he and his companions encountered along the way. Catherwood returned to England in 1826 and briefl y settled into architectural work. In 1828 some of his drawings from Egypt were exhibited at the Royal Academy, and these sparked the renewal of a friendship he had formed in the Mediterranean with Robert Hay, who was engaged in an extensive survey expedition in Egypt. Catherwood was invited to join it. During this trip, he perfected a technique of technical illustration working with a camera lucida, an optical device that uses lenses to superimpose an image of the subject onto an angled half-silvered mirror, allowing the artist to sketch it onto paper below (see fi g. 16). He created remarkably accurate images of ancient monuments in Giza, Saqqara, Abydos, and Thebes before departing in 1833 to travel to the Holy Land. Again in native guise, he recorded ruins in Syria and Lebanon. Successfully convincing the mosque guardians that he was not an infi del, he spent several weeks documenting the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem in great detail. Upon his return to England, Catherwood encountered a surprisingly lukewarm reception for the art he had risked so much to create. He eventually found work with Robert Burford on that artist’s Panorama of Jerusalem. Panoramas were massive paintings displayed
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