the Spanish troops realized, after the fact, that they had destroyed something strange and beautiful. One of the last of them, the tough and unsentimental Bernal Diaz del Castillo, looked back many years later when he was an old, blind man in Guatemala and remembered his first sight of the city in Lake Texcoco.

“It was all so wonderful that I do not know how to describe this first glimpse of things never heard of, seen or dreamed before,” Diaz wrote. He went on to lament that so much of it already was lost.

The Spanish began the destruction of Tenochtitlan within months of the conquest, and its site is buried deep beneath Mexico City.

But recent years have brought new excavations in the metropolis of 23 million, and some ofmassive ceramic sculptures in the exhibition display both aspects of the site. One is of a mighty winged warrior, while the other is a ghastly image of Mictlantecuhtli, a god of death and the underworld.

Feinman said the winged figure may have been a “spirit warrior,” the ascended soul of a soldier who fell in battle. Spirit warriors, he said, accompanied the sun god, Tonatiuh, on his triumphant rise into the sky each morning.

“The spirit warriors flew up with him until the zenith, and then the spirits of women who died in childbirth accompanied him on his way down to sunset,” he said.

Sunset would have brought him into the realm of Mictlantecuhtli, who is depicted as a naked figure with a grinning skeleton head and his liver hanging out