1000 artworks to see before you die: The Maya

Lady Xoc passes the spiked rope through her tongue while her husband Lord Shield Jaguar stands above her holding a flaming torch. It is a ritual conducted between the ruling couple late at night. They are robed, jewelled and feathered, with long faces. The limestone relief carving has a flat surface, so it looks almost like a calligraphic stamp or engraver's plate. It is one of the world's most powerful pieces of pictorial art, and one of the most challenging portraits.

This is one of a set of carved limestone lintels from a building in the Maya city of Yaxchilan, on the Usumacinta river on the borders of modern Mexico and Guatemala. It tells a story that carries on in the next lintel. As you might expect after threading a thorn-studded rope through her own tongue, Lady Xoc experiences a vision: she sees an ancestral god appear above her in the mouth of a giant serpent. Meanwhile, Lord Shield Jaguar gets ready to perform his own bloodletting ritual by sticking a stingray's barb into his penis.

To look on these pictures carved in the seventh to eighth centuries in the "classic" phase of Maya civilisation is to be confronted with a way of life so remote it almost seems like science fiction - and yet these are not just humans, they are artistically accomplished humans. Details like slender fingers, baskets holding ritual tools, stylised flames and pictograms are executed with calm confidence. And because of that, you can visualise the scene in a darkened temple where a wife tortures herself as her husband holds a torch, then hallucinates in her pain and bleeding... It's a shocking encounter with a lost world. Rembrandt portrays people we empathise with. The Yaxchilan lintels portray people who intimidate and perplex us - and yet this art makes us see the deep humanity of their existence.

The Maya - a native American people who still live in eastern Mexico and Guatemala - produced a great urban civilisation whose "classic" age lasted from about 250 to 900. They used an advanced number system and had a complex calendar. Works of art such as the Yaxchilan Lintels, which depict important royal events with dates and other details inscribed on them, reflect a strong sense of history - they are the equivalent of European works such as the Bayeux Tapestry. The mathematical and architectural achievements of the Maya would just be impersonal facts to wonder at without the humanising and troubling authority of their art.

The stylised and enigmatic, yet profoundly lucid, beauty of this art tells us who the Maya were and what they felt, before - in their cyclical view of time - the world was destroyed for a fourth time.

Key works

• Relief portrait of Stormy Sky carved in stone on Stela 31, Tikal, Guatemala (c250-c600)• Relief portrait of Curl Nose carved in stone on Stela 4, Tikal, Guatemala (c250-c600)• Leiden Plate, jadeite image of Maya ruler in triumph (c250- c600), in the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden• Tomb painting, Rio Azul, Guatemala (c250-c600)• Red clay and bead image of the god Chaak on a cache vessel, in the Stendahl Collection, LA (c250-c600)• Portrait of King Bird Jaguar in stucco, Stucture 33, Yaxchilan, Mexico (7th-8th century)• Stone relief of kings on Altar Q, Copan, western Honduras (7th-8th century)• Portrait of Cauac Sky on Stela F at Quirigua, Guatemala (7th-8th century)• Relief carvings on stone lintels from Yaxchilan, Mexico, now in the British Museum (7th-8th century)