The Legacy of Sculptors: A Study of Signatures of Artists Registered in the Maya Late Classic Monuments.

Abstract

This article should be understood as an effort to study several Maya artists’ signatures that appear in 20 public Maya monuments from the late Classic period. Using the methods of historical and epigraphical analysis, it will examine the artistic representations of several sculptures, their temporality, and the titles that are present in the signatures in order to discover the role that Maya sculptors played in the creation of their artistic works. It attempts to recognize the creative freedom they enjoyed in the execution of images which illustrate their written work, and will reveal their identity. It will examine Maya artists’ social consciousness and their technical formation. In the final analysis it hopes to demonstrate that those Maya sculptors who signed their work served both as local intellectuals and as material creators of the images portrayed in these monuments.