The Written Adornment: the many relations of text and image in Classic Maya visual culture

Abstract

This article focuses on a complex and very common practice in the Mayan visual culture of the Classic period (250-600 AD): the integration of writing elements in images. This integration can be presented under many aspects and forms and fulfills several functions. The most important of them is to create a semantic complementation with the image, indicating what it is not able to express, such as anthroponyms (personal names) and place-names. In this text we also explore the many ways in which this assimilation takes place, and we propose clear and essential principles for the detection of assimilated text elements within the images. We also explore, albeit briefly, this same practice in other Mesoamerican visual cultures, with the intention of putting it into perspective and understanding it not as an isolated and exclusive practice of the Maya, but shared by many Mesoamerican groups over several centuries.