The renowned artist Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957) was also a self-taught art historian and ethnologist who, among his extensive and rich legacy, gave rise to contributions regarding the fine male sculpture in green stone that concerns us here.
The studies of Covarrubias dedicated to the history of Mesoamerican art are interwoven with his own artistic activity and the collecting that he developed in a period in which legislation restricting the extraction and private safeguarding of archaeological pieces did not yet exist. In Mexico's post-revolutionary period, he and other figures such as Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo promoted aesthetic appreciation and scientific interest in Pre-Columbian visual arts, which received very little attention up to that point, although Covarrubias stands out because he went beyond the connection between a modern artist and the art of the past and made advances in its historical understanding, recorded in more depth in his books El águila, el jaguar y la serpiente: arte indígena americano (The Eagle, the Jaguar, and the Serpent: Indian Art of the Americas) and Arte indígena de México y Centroamérica (Indian Art of Mexico and Central America), with first editions in English respectively in 1954 and 1957.
Covarrubias was a pioneer in the research of the Olmec and Mezcala cultures; in his collection, which was integrated into the National Museum of Anthropology when it was founded in 1963, stone pieces from Guerrero and neighboring areas from other states with such attributes stood out. At an academic meeting held in 1946, he raised the possibility that the Olmec occupation in Guerrero and Oaxaca was older in the Gulf Coast region, based on the abundance of objects of this style, which, he says, “frequently appear broken and mutilated, very worn out from use, and it is possible that they were kept and used as offerings, and as archaeological objects by subsequent settlers." Subsequent dating and inquiries would refute this assumption; however, Covarrubias's contributions shed light on the Pan-Mesoamerican character of the Olmec phenomenon during the Middle Preclassic and the importance of the portable images carved in fine stones. His formal analyses exposed the diversity of cultural interactions that are distinguished in Guerrero through the Preclassic and Classic periods, while in his classification of Guerrero lapidary, he also included “Olmecoid,” “Teotihuacan," “Teotihuacanoid,” “Olmec-Teotihuacan,” and "purely local styled" objects. In particular he placed the latter in the Mezcala area, crossed by the Balsas River, and finally in the aforementioned 1957 publication, he defined them with the Mezcala-style designation.
The work we see here has this cultural attribution. The archeological inquiries that followed allowed this style to be associated with a long-term development that ranges from the late Preclassic phase to the Classic period. Compared with the accentuated schematism and geometrization of what is represented by straight cuts that distinguish the Mezcala style, the naturalistic details of the image attest to what Covarrubias detected as "a continuous 'Olmec' influence within the local styles" of Guerrero.
Features such as the long, oval head with erect tabular modification, the thick lips, the upper and lower eyelids, and the embossed buttocks and calves are reminiscent of the Olmec artistic canons in Mezcala lapidary production.
Teopantecuanitlan, Oxtotitlan, and Juxtlahuaca are some of the Middle Preclassic sites that show the Olmec in the central and northeastern areas of Guerrero. The first is a large ceremonial center with architectural vestiges such as subterranean tombs with a false vault and what has been interpreted as a symbolic model of a sunken ball court with its corners marked by four monolithic sculptures of colossal size engraved with anthropomorphic images of fantastic appearance. Juxtlahuaca and Oxtotitlan offer exceptional cave paintings that explicitly express the deep sacred and political relationship that Mesoamericans established with the caves and hills. In general, finds of transportable Olmec pieces have been prolific throughout the state, related to the dynamism of the historical processes of Mesoamerica. As things change, our sculpture implies the presence of the past and the probable meanings of this must necessarily be raised in multiple ways.
