This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
No artist signed the Bonampak murals, and no ancient text names who painted them. What survives instead is the work itself, more than 280 figures spread across three rooms in over thirty distinct pigment combinations, including Maya Blue, hematite red, carbon black and lime white, applied directly to lime plastered masonry walls sometime around AD 790 to 792. Art historian Mary Ellen Miller, whose 1986 study The Murals of Bonampak remains the standard scholarly account of the paintings, concluded from the work's scale and technical consistency that its planning and execution required a large team of specialists working together, not the vision of one solitary painter.
The murals were unknown to scholars until 1946, when the photographer and explorer Giles Healey became the first outsider documented to see and record them, even though local Lacandon Maya had continued visiting the site for prayer throughout the centuries in between. Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia has managed the site since, including a 2009 to 2010 conservation project that used cleaning and closer documentation to reveal pictorial elements that had gone unrecorded, adding new detail to a painting whose original makers remain, more than a thousand years later, anonymous.