Note 429 — Chapter VI · [263]

It is impossible to look at Waldeck’s finished drawings of buildings, where Time seems scarcely to have set his mark on the nicely chiselled stone, and the clear tints are hardly defaced by a weather-stain, without regarding the artist’s work as a restoration; a picture true, it may be, of those buildings in the day of their glory, but not of their decay.—Cogolludo, who saw them in the middle of the seventeenth century, speaks of them with admiration, as works of “accomplished architects,” of whom history has preserved no tradition. Historia de Yucatan (Madrid, 1688), lib. 4, cap. 2.{*}

{*} [The age of these ancient cities is still an unsolved problem, but the conviction seems to be growing that many of them were inhabited at the time of the Conquest. The sacred edifices at Uxmal did not cease to be used until some time after the Spaniards had become lords of the land. Charnay (Ancient Cities of the New World, p. 328) thinks Chichen Itza was inhabited “scarcely sixty years before the Conquest.” Bandelier (Peabody Museum Report, ii. 126) says of the Tablet of the Cross at Palenque, “These tablets and figures show in dress such a striking analogy of what we know of the military accoutrements of the Mexicans, that it is a strong approach to identity.” Bancroft (Native Races, vol. iv.) specifies the literature dealing with Palenque. For a while scholars were mystified by Waldeck’s absurd elephants on the walls of Palenque. But after a time these animal representations were shown to have existed only in the artist’s brain.—M.]