Cross-Eyed Conqueror

In his sprawling mural cavalcades of Mexican history, Diego Rivera has painted at least four portraits of Conquistador Hernando Cortes, always as a handsome, broad-shouldered hero. Last week Rivera fans, examining his latest addition to the murals in Mexico City's National Palace, met a new character, a cross-eyed, hunch backed, bowlegged cretin. "It's Sancho Panza," was their immediate reaction.

Nonsense, barked Rivera, "It's Cortes." "I have been a victim of history," explained Rivera, whose lowbrowed Cortes fits current Mexican Nationalist versions of the Spanish adventurer. "All the pictures of Cortes that historians have shown us up to now are really copies of Emperor Charles the Fifth. When Cortes was alive, he never allowed a picture of himself to be made."*Rivera said he based his new Cortes on scientific examination of the Spaniard's cranium and leg bones, discovered in 1947 in a floor crypt of the Mexico City's ancient Hospital of Jesus. "I have painted Cortes this way to give an exact idea of him and destroy the legend."

"It is ridiculous," replied Dr. Javier Romero, anthropologist at Mexico's National Museum. "True, Cortes' legs were slightly bowed, as are those of most habitual horsemen, but it is impossible to determine from the skull whether the man was balding, whiskered, cross-eyed and humpbacked."

Rivera was not the least taken aback. Pointing out that one of anthropology's favorite activities is reconstructing whole races from a few scattered bones, he snorted contemptuously, "the opinion of Mr. Romero is anti-anthropological."

*There are three or four portraits in existence with some claim to having been painted in Cortes lifetime. Bernal Diaz del Castillo described him around 1568 as being "of a good height and body and well proportioned . . . His chest was high and his back of a good shape, and he was lean and of little belly."

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