'The Aztec Empire'

This new show, which opened last Friday at New York's Guggenheim Museum, left Holland Cotter, the New York Times' reviewer, speechless.

He wrote, "There are no words."

In doing so, he echoed Albrecht Durer who wrote, in 1520, upon seeing some of the first Aztec art to reach Europe, "In all my life I have never seen anything that gladdened my heart so much as these things. Indeed, I cannot express all that I thought."

When we think of the Aztecs, we never seem to juxtapose its reality with that of the temporally coexisting world of Western Europe.

Not until now did I ever consider that Durer was alive and working in Germany at the very same time the Aztec Empire was at its very peak.

Cortés only arrived on the shores of what would become Mexico in 1519, at which time Aztec culture was less than 200 years old.

Durer went on to write that the art from "the new golden land" was "more beautiful to me than miracles."

Exactly one year later, in 1521, Cortés destroyed the Aztec civilization.

What remains are only the stone and metal images of their gods.

The Guggenheim show is up until February 13, 2005.

[via Holland Cotter and the New York Times]