In late September, a group of extraordinary
treasures will travel from Mexico to
California as the core of a new exhibition devoted
to the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan.
Teotihuacan: City of Water, City of Fire, opening
at the de Young Museum in San Francisco
and then traveling to the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, is the fi rst major exhibition on
the city since the de Young’s presentation of Teotihuacan:
Art from the City of the Gods in 1993.
Since that time, the national and international
teams working at Teotihuacan’s main pyramids—
the Sun Pyramid, the Moon Pyramid,
and the Feathered Serpent Pyramid—have made
signifi cant discoveries that have fundamentally
changed our understanding of the city’s history.
The exhibition and catalog, carried out in close
collaboration with archaeologists from Mexico’s
Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia
(INAH) as well as with experts from the
TEOTIHUACAN
City of Water, City of Fire
By Matthew H. Robb
110
FIG. 1 (above):
Circular relief.
Teotihuacan, Anahuac,
Mexico. AD 300–450.
Stone. H: 125 cm.
Museo Nacional de Antropología,
inv. INAH, 10-81807.
Archivo Digital de las Colecciones del
Museo Nacional de Antropología/
INAH-CANON.
Image courtesy of the Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco.
FIG. 2 (above right):
Moon Pyramid.
Teotihuacan, Anahuac,
Mexico.
Photo: Eye Ubiquitous/UIG via Getty
Images.
Image courtesy of the Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco.
United States and Europe, surveys these fi ndings
to illustrate the roles that objects and sculptural
programs at these central locations played in
the lives of Teotihuacan’s citizens. It also examines
life in the urban and suburban residential
sectors, where artisans created powerful works
of art whose themes tied directly to the urban
architecture that was carefully planned by the
city’s ruling elite.
Teotihuacan stands as both a paradigmatic
example and exception of urbanism in Mesoamerica.
Somewhat surprisingly, the excavations
at the three pyramids suggest that they were not
dedicated to the memory of specifi c individuals
who ruled the city. Instead, their exterior sculptures
and interior offerings present complex and
symbolic combinations of material and imagery
that scholars are only beginning to understand
and decipher.
Founded in the fi rst century BC in the Valley of
Mexico, the metropolis was, at its peak around
AD 400, the cultural, political, economic, and
religious center of ancient Mesoamerica, marked
by its enormous pyramids, long avenues, and a
large number of residential compounds housing
a multiethnic population of perhaps one hundred
thousand people. Its urban plan, where
pyramids stand in for mountains and elaborate
water management systems turned tunnels
and plazas into metaphorical rivers and lakes,
refl ects a deep fascination with the surrounding
landscape. Teotihuacan’s rulers and citizens
brought that natural world into the urban environment
through geomantic alignments like that
of the Street of the Dead and the mountain of
Cerro Gordo, creating a visual effect that slowly
substitutes the Moon Pyramid (fi g. 2) for the
mountain behind it as one walks north through
ART on view