Eagle Relief 10th-13th century Toltec This exquisitely carved stone panel, one of a pair given to the museum by the Hudson River School painter Frederic Church in 1893, depicts an eagle biting into a cactus fruit, a symbolic representation of the sun devouring a human heart. The two panels are nearly identical in size and imagery and may originally have formed part of a larger composition on the façade of a temple or other sacred building (see MMA 93.27.2). The Eagle Panels are among the finest examples of Mesoamerican stone relief sculpture, highly sophisticated in both composition and technique. In each, the curve of the birds back, from its head through its tail feathers, forms an arc that determines the entire composition and nearly fills the frame. The artist has placed glyph-like scrolls, shells, pierced circles (chalchihuitl), and what appears to be a bundle of reeds or a stylized ear of maize in the remaining spaces. A narrow, raised band once framed the image, and the remaini