Buried Treasure

To the Indians who flourished in Latin America before Columbus, gold was absolutely sacred. The Aztecs of Central Mexico called it "teocuit latl," (the excrement of the gods). The Incas of Peru thought of it as the "sweat of the sun." The metal was so plentiful and easy to work that the pre-Columbian Indians used it to make earrings, pendants, funerary masks, drinking vessels, furniture, and even entire artificial gardens. In fact, they used the gold they loved so much for practically everything but money; for that, they chose humbler commodities like beans.

More interested in bullion than beauty, the Spanish conquistadores who overran the Indians in the 16th century systematically plundered all the golden artifacts they could find, either converting them to ingots on the spot or shipping them to Spain to be melted down. As a result, pre-Columbian objets d'art are so rare that any display of them is a notable event.

A current, particularly choice event is "The Gold of Ancient America," an exhibit of 136 pieces originally excavated from Indian graves and drawn from 29 public and private collections (see color opposite). Last week the exhibit finished a month's run at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts; it will open at Chicago's Art Institute in February and move to Richmond's Virginia Museum in March.

Innocent Beauty. Selected by Allen Wardwell, 33, curator of primitive arts at the Art Institute, the comprehensive exhibit shows how the ancient Indian goldsmiths ground, hammered and cast the precious metal into highly stylized objects. Though the innocent beauty of the pieces was lost on the greedy conquistadores, it has intrigued modern artists such as Lipchitz, Moore, Klee, Brancusi and Dubuffet.

Jaguars, snakes, frogs and alligators, as well as human faces and figures, provided the artisans with their motifs. The goldsmiths executed them with increasing sophistication. The very first of them, the Chavin Indians of Peru, for example, had only crude stone tools with which to beat the pure metal into shape.

Far more advanced were the later Quimbaya Indians of Colombia, who discovered how to make alloys of gold and copper and also mastered the sophisticated "lost-wax" technique of casting. First, the Indians made a model of the sculpture in beeswax or resin and covered it with a powdered charcoal and then a thick layer of clay. Next, they applied heat, melting the wax so that it ran out a channel in the hardened clay impression. They then used the impression as a breakable mold, pouring the molten gold in through the channel in the clay. It is the same method that dentists use today in making gold inlays.

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