The Codex Style is one of the most celebrated and recognizable styles of

Ancient Maya art Ancient Maya art is the visual arts of the Maya civilization, an eastern and south-eastern Mesoamerican culture made up of a great number of small kingdoms in present-day Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. Many regional artistic traditions ex ...

. It was first identified in 1973 by

Michael Coe Michael Douglas Coe (May 14, 1929 – September 25, 2019) was an American archaeologist, anthropologist, epigrapher, and author. He is known for his research on pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, particularly the Maya, and was among the foremost Mayan ...

in the book ''The Maya Scribe and His World'', in which the PSS (Primary Standard Sequence) was discovered. Coe called it “codex style” because he believed that the authors of the designs on the vessels were the same scribes who had painted or written the

codices The codex (plural codices ) was the historical ancestor of the modern book. Instead of being composed of sheets of paper, it used sheets of vellum, papyrus, or other materials. The term ''codex'' is often used for ancient manuscript books, with ...

and that the paintings on the vessels imitated the images found within them. The definition was later taken up by Robicsek and Hales in their book ''The Maya Book of Dead'', the title of which reveals the assumption that the vases could deal with subjects such as the

Book of the Dead The ''Book of the Dead'' ( egy, 𓂋𓏤𓈒𓈒𓈒𓏌𓏤𓉐𓂋𓏏𓂻𓅓𓉔𓂋𓅱𓇳𓏤, ''rw n(y)w prt m hrw(w)'') is an ancient Egyptian funerary text generally written on papyrus and used from the beginning of the New Kingdom ...

of the Ancient Egyptians and Underworld themes. Several hypotheses have emerged about the origin of these ceramic typologies. After the discovery of the Codex Scribe Vessel 1 and of other “codex” style fragments in

Nakbe Nakbe is one of the largest early Maya archaeological sites. Nakbe is located in the Mirador Basin, in the Petén region of Guatemala, approximately 13 kilometers south of the largest Maya city of El Mirador. Excavations at Nakbe suggest that ha ...

it was thought that these vessels were produced by several workshops in the region of north-eastern Petén, Guatemala, namely the areas of Nakbe and

El Mirador El Mirador (which translates as "the lookout", "the viewpoint", or "the belvedere") is a large pre-Columbian Middle and Late Preclassic (1000 BC - 250 AD) Mayan settlement, located in the north of the modern department of El Petén, Guatemal ...

. Recent studies and findings have shown that codex-style pottery was also manufactured at the site of

Calakmul Calakmul (; also Kalakmul and other less frequent variants) is a Maya archaeological site in the Mexican state of Campeche, deep in the jungles of the greater Petén Basin region. It is from the Guatemalan border. Calakmul was one of the large ...

in Campeche.

Description of the Style

The Codex Style, as the name already clarifies, has a strong resemblance to the surviving Postclassic Maya codices. Comparing the scenes painted in the corpus of codex style vases, artistic devices such as the contrast of a black line on a white (or cream) background with the addition of a

hieroglyphic Egyptian hieroglyphs (, ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt, used for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters.There were about 1,00 ...

caption illustrating the

iconography Iconography, as a branch of art history, studies the identification, description and interpretation of the content of images: the subjects depicted, the particular compositions and details used to do so, and other elements that are distinct fro ...

recalled the uses of color and space in the

Dresden Codex The ''Dresden Codex'' is a Maya civilization, Maya book, which was believed to be the oldest surviving book written in the Americas, dating to the 11th or 12th century. However, in September 2018 it was proven that the Maya Codex of Mexico, pre ...

and the other three Postclassic handwritings. File:Codex-Style Vase with Mythological Scene MET DP-579-002.jpg, Codex-style vase with a mythological scene; 7th–8th century; ceramic. Height: 19 cm (7.5 in), diameter: 11.2 cm (4.4 in).

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

. File:Maya Codex-Style Vessel with two scenes 3 Kimbell.jpg, Vessel with a scene of the instruction of a scribe; c. 550-950 CE; ceramic. Height: 9.5 cm (3.74 in), diameter: 10.5 cm (4.13 in).

Kimbell Art Museum The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, hosts an art collection as well as traveling art exhibitions, educational programs and an extensive research library. Its initial artwork came from the private collection of Kay and Velma Kimbell, wh ...

References

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Bibliography

* Boucher, Sylviane, and Yoly Palomo, ''Discriminación visual como determinante de estilo y asignación tipológica de la cerámica códice de Calakmul, Campeche''. Estudios de cultura maya 39: 99–132 2012. * Coe, Michael D., ''The Maya Scribe and His World''. New York: The Grolier Club 1973. * Coe, Michael D., ''Lords of the Underworld; Masterpieces of Classic Maya Ceramics''. New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1978. * Coe, Michael D., and Justin Kerr, ''The Art of the Maya Scribe''. Thames and Hudson 1997. * Delvendahl, Kai, ''Calakmul in Sight: History and Archaeology of an Ancient Maya City''. Unas Letras Industria Editorial 2008. * Robicsek, Francis, and Donald Hales, ''The Maya Book of the Dead: The Corpus of Codex Style Ceramics of the Late Classic period''. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1981. Maya Classic Period Pre-Columbian pottery Mesoamerican artifacts Maya art