Antique Print of a Ruin of a Temple of the Inca's in Mexico, 1857

About this piece

A ruined temple in Mexico, an original steel engraving of 1857 from Carl August Menzel's Die Kunstwerke vom Alterthum bis auf die Gegenwart, a guide to the monuments of architecture, painting and sculpture. The sheet is untitled and carries a plate number at the upper right.

The engraving shows a tall stepped building of several receding stories, with rows of small rectangular openings and carved stonework, rising from a jungle clearing. Dense tropical trees and creepers surround it, vines hang on its upper walls and agaves grow in the foreground. Two tiny figures are seated at the foot of the mound in front, which gives a sense of the scale of the ruin. The tonal gradation of the engraving, from the pale stone to the dark foliage, gives the view a romantic feeling in the manner of the early nineteenth century.

The old listing names this an Inca temple, but the stepped pyramid with its openings in the style shown is typical of the architecture of the Maya region of Mexico rather than Peru. Menzel's work, issued in the middle of the nineteenth century, illustrated monuments from antiquity to the present.