Reviews for The sculpture of Palenque

The average rating for The sculpture of Palenque based on 1 review is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-03-08 00:00:00 Michael Quinn Let it never be said there wasn't a lot of information here. And it got started straight out of the gate, too. Each section looked at a very specific feature from a different Mayan site, and went over the iconography and glyphs in detail, alongside illustrations so you could follow along. I was gratified to see that I'm making a very incremental improvement (VERY INCREMENTAL) in understanding the visual structure. Although it was still notable at those times when the authors would point out "now this is a very unusual figure," which is, you know, compared to all those other bird nose-person head-snake mouth figures. Rest assured, I get that it's all relative, but STILL. And I know that Mayan artists were perfectly capable of creating very realistic depictions of people and animals, and that ceremonial and institutional architecture was intentionally stylized and abstracted, but after a while (A LONG WHILE) of reading with my finger to try to follow what was going on in a frieze, I was sometimes thinking "MY DUDES, one thing that will really sell an animal is if the face is toward the top/front. In that general direction. Top/front. The face." I'm being facetious; the scope of the work is magnificent and overwhelming. I worked harder to understand this content than I did in some of my college courses. SORRY MOM.