MEMENTO MORI.

The hypercivilized, unimaginably savage Aztecs made war almost tenderly, wielding wooden swords that were edged with bits of obsidian or flint and, in face-to-face combat, endeavoring not to kill their enemies but, commonly by striking at their legs, to disable and capture them. Later, the captives--thousands of them for a rededication of the Great Temple at Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) in 1478--were led to high platforms, where priests tore out and displayed their still-beating hearts. An especially respected prisoner might be allowed to fight for his life against Aztec warriors, at the last, with clubs and a sword, but his sword was edged with feathers. If he behaved well, his soul would ascend to a "flower paradise," one of the Aztecs' thirteen heavens. (People who died of ordinary disease or old age incurred ignominy in the afterlife.) His body was given to his original captor, who drank the blood and wore the flayed skin until, in the words of the military historian John Keegan, "it and its scraps of attached flesh rotted into deliquescence." The Aztecs, while consolidating their imperial sway over central Mexico, were probably as lethal on the battlefield as conquerors usually are; but, from the middle of the fifteenth century until 1519, when they met an enemy of a bewildering new sort, their main casus belli was a standing order for sacrificial victims. The stability and very survival of the world enjoined it, in the view of their religion. (The key belief was that certain gods, having sacrificed themselves to make human existence possible, demanded incessant repayment in kind.) No other people known to history practiced ritual murder so relentlessly, on so grand a scale.

"The Aztec Empire," at the Guggenheim, is advertised as the most comprehensive exhibition of Aztec art ever mounted outside Mexico. Backed by Mexican governmental agencies and corporations, it amounts to a diplomatic potlatch, sparing no effort or expense. Its four hundred and thirty-five exhibits, some of them multi-part, of stone and fired-clay sculpture, ritual and domestic objects, jewelry, and early colonial artifacts, place the Aztecs--or Mexicas, as the core group of the empire is properly named--in context with cultures that preceded or opposed them. The works are presented, one by one or in small groups, along serpentine walls covered with dark-gray wool felt, effecting point-blank encounters with their often terrific force. The show centers on objects from the Great Temple, whose treasure-laden ruins were discovered, by accident, only in 1978. Statues of gods and warriors are preponderant--as are animals, which compose a marvellous bestiary that ranges from hieratic snakes and jaguars to an enormous stone flea. (Vegetables were venerated, too; the sleek beauty of a green stone pumpkin, more than a foot long, evokes Brancusi.) Like ancient Greek sculpture, Aztec statuary has lost all but traces of its original polychrome surface. Mostly gone, too, are teeth and eyes of obsidian and shell, which, in surviving examples, bring figures to burning life. But scarcely anything in the show feels like filler or fails to enthrall. You will want to visit "The Aztec Empire" more than once.

I couldn't shake the thought that most of the show's contents were made with and for eyes that routinely beheld terrible acts, including rites of "autosacrifice," which the Aztecs performed at all their religious ceremonies. (The higher a man's status in the theocratic and military state, the more self-wounding was expected of him.) Handsome basins for blood and body parts abound. Sights and smells of gore attended normal life in Tenochtitlan--children must have grown up liking them. Oddly, the alien and alienating viciousness of Aztec culture makes it more accessible than that of other bygone and tribal nations. It provides dramatic focus. Confronting such things as a blackly humorous skull mask, made from a real skull, we know exactly where we stand with the Aztecs: aghast. The supreme quality of their supple, sensitive, elegant arts may be the scariest thing about them, because it testifies that a civilization based on slaughter steadied and inspired human genius.

"Powerful" is the mot juste for the creativity of the Aztecs, whose familiarity with death-dealing seems to have imparted a rangy, even insouciant fearlessness. A viewer soon recognizes differences between Aztec art and the ...