Clearing a View

Frederick Catherwood had brought an instrument for accurate drawing to Copán. He still could not make a drawing that satisfied him. The carved figures were unfamiliar, their surfaces crowded with forms he could not read. He tried the camera lucida and tried without it. Mosquitoes reached his hands; his feet stood in mud.

This was late 1839, in the forested valley of Copán in what is now western Honduras. Catherwood, a British architectural artist experienced in recording Mediterranean monuments, was travelling with the American writer John Lloyd Stephens. Their illustrations would bring the ancient Maya city to a large readership. First, they needed enough light to see what they were copying.

Stephens's account records a practical improvement the next day. The light fell more favourably on the sculpture. Catherwood wore gloves, recovered waterproof boots from a bag lost in the river and spread oiled canvas beneath his drawing stand. He obtained a satisfactory result. The bag had been retrieved by Bartolo, one of the people helping the travellers.

Five years later, Catherwood published a large lithographic view in which carved heads, a round stone and a statue's surviving feet occupy a forest clearing before a stepped mound. No drawing stand or muddy boots interrupts the scene. Nor does any of the labour that made the sculpture visible.

The people around the ruins

Copán was the centre of a Maya kingdom whose documented dynasty extended from AD 426 into the early ninth century. Its rulers commissioned buildings, portraits and inscriptions in stone. The monuments belonged to that history long before they became material for a foreign travel book.

The place was known, too. The Spanish official Diego García de Palacio described it in 1576, recording its local name. In the 1830s Juan Galindo investigated the ruins under Central American government authority. Stephens knew Galindo's published account. The travellers arrived among settlements, farms, paths and competing claims to land and labour.

Their access depended on those relationships. Don Miguel and his wife provided lodging. Don Miguel read Stephens's Spanish credentials aloud. Don Gregorio, who had a nearby hacienda, became hostile when the newcomers' wages attracted workers away from him. A payment could buy work and create an enemy at the same time.

Stephens also negotiated with Don José María, proposing fifty dollars for an interest in the ground containing the ruins. His own account makes the transaction less straightforward than the familiar story of buying a city: José María held the tract on a lease, with about three years left, rather than owning the freehold.

The negotiations faltered under Don Gregorio's opposition. Stephens reports that Catherwood eventually paid and completed the contract. The narrative celebrates the travellers' success, but it also records how much their undertaking depended on local authority, employment and disputed access.

Stephens's recollections need that sort of attentive reading. His writing retains names and working details alongside condescending judgements about the people employed. Those judgements tell us about the writer; they do not measure his assistants' skill.

Making the stone visible

The forest interfered with drawing before the pencil touched the sheet. Around one monument, vegetation left the carving too deeply shaded to distinguish. Workers cut trees and cleared the ground so light could reach it. Catherwood's apparently direct observation began with a changed setting.

Two assistants emerge particularly clearly. Bruno was a tailor. Francisco found the feet and legs of a broken figure; Bruno found a section of its body. They searched for further pieces and stood the surviving figure up, still without a head. The scattered carving had become more intelligible through their recognition and assembly of its parts.

The same men helped measure the site. Stephens directed the survey with a compass and a reel of tape previously used by Catherwood at Thebes and Jerusalem. Workers opened sight lines through the woods. Bruno and Francisco put their hats on poles to mark stations, and distances were measured towards them. Catherwood prepared the drawn plan.

A camera lucida helped with another kind of measurement: keeping the drawn outline in proportion. Its prism allowed the draughtsman to see the subject apparently superimposed on his paper. Looking through it, he could place his pencil against the apparent image and trace an outline. The image existed in the combined view at his eye; it was not a projection lying on the sheet.

The hand still had work to do. Stephens describes outlines made with the instrument and small details subsequently filled in with pencil. Light had to disclose a carved edge before either instrument or artist could follow it. Catherwood's unsuccessful first attempts show why owning the apparatus did not settle the matter.

A closer look · 1:23 · Visual animation; Catalan credits

Drawing through a prism

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A view assembled afterwards

Physical movement also formed part of the work. Stephens describes rolling a large sculptural fragment down several steps until it lodged among stones. Bruno and Francisco assembled their broken figure. Objects were uncovered, shifted and made easier to inspect; the undertaking did not leave their positions untouched.

For Plate II, Catherwood performed a further rearrangement on paper. His accompanying description explicitly says that the foreground fragments had been found at some distance from the building. The print puts them together where the reader can examine them against an architectural setting.

He described the background as a pyramidal structure, then qualified it as possibly part of a much larger terraced mound. He estimated its height at thirty-five feet, about eleven metres, and described small stones laid in mortar with a former coating of stucco. On its broad top he saw no surviving temple. Possible former buildings or statues remained a supposition.

He was less cautious about giving the fragments roles. A carved skull might be a monkey worshipped as a deity. A grooved round stone became a possible sacrificial altar. Heads received the identities of warrior and chieftain. These were his interpretations, made while the writing on the monuments remained unreadable to him. The picture cannot establish those functions, or tell us that Francisco's recovered feet were the particular feet Catherwood placed at the right.

His finished pictures could change in other ways between versions. A signed watercolour of 1843 and the following year's lithograph of a broken monument retain a recognisable arrangement of fallen sculpture. In the print, a deer occupies the foreground and the forest has been redrawn around the stone. The watercolour is itself a finished later work, not a dated sheet from the 1839 drawing stand.

Another artist at the stone

The 1844 folio, Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, was a different publication from Stephens's illustrated narrative. Its twenty-five large plates gave the views room to become pictures in their own right. Catherwood hired professional lithographers; Plate II credits Henry Warren with drawing it on stone.

Lithography allowed the image to be drawn with greasy materials on a prepared surface. Dampening and inking exploited the different responses of the marked and unmarked areas: oily printing ink adhered to the drawing, while the wet undrawn stone resisted it. Paper pressed against the surface received the image. It required another artist's decisions about marks and tone, rather than simply enlarging a field sheet.

There was a further break in the chain. A fire at Catherwood's New York panorama in 1842 destroyed many drawings and collected objects. The surviving record does not establish the particular preparatory sheet Warren used for Plate II. The folio appeared in an edition of three hundred: two hundred and fifty stone-tinted copies and fifty hand-coloured ones. Readers encountered the same selected monuments through differing printed and coloured surfaces.

Lines that outlasted the stone

Composition did not make Catherwood's close copying worthless. A much smaller engraving published in Stephens's 1841 book records the back of the monument now called Stela F. Its intricate signs were copied before the travellers could read their historical content.

In 2008, the epigrapher David Stuart noticed details in this engraving that were already missing or damaged in Alfred Maudslay's photograph of 1884. Catherwood's lines helped him propose readings for damaged glyphs, including part of a statement about the stone's erection. Some reconstruction remained uncertain.

The monument recorded a ceremony of Copán's thirteenth ruler, Waxaklajuun Ubaah K'awiil. A drawing made under difficult conditions preserved marks that a later camera could no longer record. The printed line had survived the carved one.