Threatened artworks now accessible through interactive website photos

The new Interactive tour of colonial Mayan churches website identifies entire iconographic programs in Maya Christian Churches. This multidisciplinary project analyzes religious murals painted by Christianized Maya artists in Yucatán, Mexico, between 1550 and 1750. Project director Amara Solari, associate professor of art history, was awarded a grant from the Center for Humanities and Information to construct the website http://mavcor.org/Yucat%C3%A1n_tour/. Solari and co-PI Linda Williams now have the possibility of tracing the early modern print sources for these images, and by extension, have a sense of what religious texts (illustrated books) were housed in the monastic libraries. The digital information is allowing for the reconstruction of the theological treatises the Franciscans were using in the 16th century and how they were (re)interpreting post-Tridentine decrees for their indigenous neophytes. These images have also allowed for a complete upending of the historiographically-established stylistic development of Indigenous painting in the colonial period.