A superb show on art and divinity educates and thrills.

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE L ives of the Gods: Divinity in Maya Art, the new exhibition at the Met, isn’t strictly an art show, though we can approach and enjoy it via gorgeous, fantastic art alone. At its heart, it’s about ancient Maya concepts of divinity. On the one hand, it’s a survey show of Maya art and religion. On the other, it’s a sophisticated, exacting mix of disciplines. Deciphering the art we see demands not only art history but archaeology, ethnology, and linguistics. It’s full of wonders and surprises. It’s an exceptionally good exhibition.

The art is mostly from what’s called the Maya’s Classic period, from around a.d. 250 to 900. By that time, the character, genealogy, and hierarchy of Mayan gods was set, as was an iconography for their care and feeding from mere mortals. Artists visualized not only deities but the origins of the Mayan world.

The term “Maya” once meant a language, but these days it’s a culture and people from the Yucatán Peninsula and Chiapas and Tabasco in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and parts of El Salvador and Honduras. About 6 million people there still use variations of the language. There’s a diaspora here in the U.S., too.

Though the study of Mayan civilization is hundreds of years old, Mayan art history is a recent field. Enhancing every discipline is the decipherment of ancient Mayan script and hieroglyphs. That’s very new.

The Maya had big cities with high-rise towers and temples, bustling business districts, and palaces. It was an intricate society and, by their standards of science, advanced. Around 700 or 800, even well-born Englishmen and women were still tanning hides with their teeth. The Maya were far from Christian. Their world was an isolated one. Both society and art were close to an exotic, tropical nature. Nature was their reference point. Rain, water, lightning, the sun, nighttime, the moon, and maize acquired human characteristics and experienced birth, youth, robust adulthood, old age, and death.

Beginning the exhibition is a squared vessel from the late 700s. It might depict gods present at the start of measured time, determined to be on August 11, 3114 b.c. Presiding over ten deities is a god with jaguar ears pleased with himself and smoking a cigar. Jaguars signaled warlike gods who, like the animal, moved at night, in stealth, the kind of gods who surprise and stun but get the job done. Then they get to take it easy with a long Sucker Punch smoke.

Maize, the ubiquitous food source, has a dedicated god, often seen as a young, handsome, graceful man. The god doesn’t live forever, though. Vessels show his birth from a seed, dancing in the prime of life, or swaying like a corn stalk, and drowning in a lake. He always makes a comeback. The moon is often a young woman.

Copulation mostly — there’s the matinée — happens at night, and the moon’s light attracts suitors. In one cylinder vessel from around a.d. 700, the suitor’s head is shaped like a hummingbird’s. As a beak pierces a flower . . . well, you get the picture. Sometimes the moon goddess carries a rabbit, a wascally wabbit, it seems, since rabbits were symbols of trickery. Moon goddesses can deceive. Not all women are open books.

“We had faces then,” said Norma Desmond. Not faces like the Mayan gods. Chahk, the rain god, had spiral eyes, fangs, scales, and sometimes an axe through his head. An accessory lightning god was portrayed as an axe. The head of a maize god, in a sculpture from around 715, is shaped like the tip of a corn cob and mostly bald except for wisps of hair like corn silk. Gods protecting writers, artists, and painters look like monkeys.

Two censer stands from the Kimbell Art Museum, the Met’s partner in the show, are horror-film scary. They’re from Palenque, a Mayan city, and were made around 700. The faces combine animal and human features, and let’s not overlook the headdresses, which are little Grand Guignol towers. The center stands depict gods, and Mayan gods have hands and feet in multiple worlds, among them the dream world. The best artists thus had a field day for their talents.

Whistling vessels abound. They’re made from two separate chambers, one open and the other sealed with a tiny vent on top. They’re joined at the base by a conduit that pushes water poured in the open chamber into the closed one. Air forced through the vent makes a subtle whistling sound. The two chambers were often figural, which made narrative possible.

My favorite is a polished blackware object from the fifth century. One chamber depicts a god shaped like a bird, crowned and with serpentine wings. The other is in the form of a supplicant. The bird figure whistles. Charming, yes, but the vessel comes from hundreds of years of puzzling how we mortals relate to the gods, who are symbols of a wild, otherwise inscrutable nature.

Colors and materials were storytellers, too. Jade, for instance, was precious and used for carved miniatures of birds worn by royals. Maya kings and princes were conduits to the gods; the birds symbolized their job as carrier pigeons from our realm to theirs. Maya blue is the color of choice and distinction, and it’s exquisite. The artists were talented colorists.

The art doesn’t go from mild to wild. It’s more or less all wild. Figures shake, rattle, and roll. Colors are far from pastel. This is a culture that wasn’t smitten with reason. It’s not Athens in the days of the Symposium. The art looks like a 24-hour-a-day bacchanal but with great design sense.

The exhibition is strong across the board. I learned a lot and, in a good sign, want to learn more. The objects at the end of the exhibition suggest a fancy for earthly happenings subtly undercutting the cult of the gods. A political and economic collapse occurred in the tenth century. I don’t know why but that’s for future reading.

The show gives us some clues. A limestone column from around 900 is more about earthly wealth than divine worship. It depicts a ruler-warrior wearing a headdress decorated with dozens of quetzal bird feathers. They’re attached to flowers, so he looks embraced by a lush garden. He holds a shield. His face is red, a sign of a sun god’s presence, but he’s not a god. He’s not Joe Sixpack, but he’s very much part of humanity.

An inscribed stone throne tells us about the ascent of a new lord of Piedras Negras, a region now on the border of Guatemala and Mexico. He’s well connected locally and to the gods, we learn. Today, historians know the lord was dumped in 808, the throne vandalized, and Piedras Negras soon abandoned. Can’t blame Columbus for this one, or, in my opinion, for much else.

Divinity in Maya Art is smartly organized. A couple of introductory galleries explore both the aesthetic and the gods. The big — and key — gallery panels are tilted to suggest books I’m reading. Small objects have room both to breathe and to exalt their natural drama. A tilted wall case gives what seems like a talking part to a lime-toned maize god from the British Museum.

Little glyph blocks borrowed from a museum in Tabasco — 5 inches square — are and aren’t a revelation. Maya design is a big inspiration for American Art Deco. The curators don’t need to hammer the point. They present the objects well and let us put the puzzle together.

Accompanying photographs of cylindrical vessels are roll-out photographs made by exposing film in tiny increments as the object rotates on a turntable. Very clever.

Though George Kubler, the founder of Mesoamerican studies, and Mary Miller, the great Mesoamerican scholar, were very present when I was in graduate school, I never took a class on Mayan art with them. Not from a lack of desire, though. The timing was never right, and I wanted to finish my dissertation with dispatch. My fault.

Sam Edgerton, my mentor at Williams, was one of a remarkable number of art historians who discovered Mayan art late in life. Sam was a Giotto specialist, but a visit to Yucatán blew his mind, mostly because of Maya conceptions of science and botany. He tempted me to convert from good ol’ American art. Alas, the frisson fizzled when I learned that he wore flea collars on his ankles when he went on digs. I like my art history bug-and-itch-free. No one got fleas from studying Washington Allston.

Last month the scholarly journal Ancient Mesoamerica published news of the discovery of an ancient Mayan city in the central Guatemalan jungle. Ruins there date from 1000 b.c. to a.d. 150. Obscured by tropical forests, the site was discovered using light-detecting and ranging radar, or laser beams sent from aircraft to the ground surface and reflected back to sensors. Maps developed from the data read the surface without vegetation. The city seems to have been big, with soaring towers and pyramids and a 110-mile network of raised roads, or what archaeologists call “the first freeway in the world.”

The discovery astonishes gringos like me, but archaeologists were surprised, too. It tells us, among much else, that illuminating and transformative news about the Maya culture is still to be found. This makes the Met show more timely and compelling. I felt I was learning something fresh to the world and that, through the Met’s scholarship, I was on the cusp.

That’s real art history, not what I call Meghan Markle art history. That facile, pukesome “she made me cry” approach to life puts grievance and revenge ahead of knowledge and understanding. The Met has indulged in lots of woe-is-the-world piffle. Good to see it’s giving us substance in this exhibit, not slush. Lives of the Gods feels like a documentary. I’m there, and thank you for making me feel like Indiana Jones, if only for a little while.

After Lives of the Gods runs at the Met, it goes to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. This is the Kimbell’s 50th anniversary. The museum organized the Maya show with the Met. All the Kimbell’s shows are great, but this year it’s highlighting the scope and sophistication of its collection, which includes the two censer stands. Its recent Murillo exhibition was wonderful. It’s the Maya’s turn next. This fall, I’m seeing its landmark Bonnard show. For a small collection, the Kimbell covers a wide chronology, and everything it owns is the very best.