19th C. Guerrero Wood Dance Mask - Wind Spirit with Glass Eyes

North America, Mexico, Guerrero, Mestizo folk tradition. A round face caught mid-breath, both cheeks swollen to their limit, the lips pursed tight at the center. Carved from a single block of wood with a deep, smoky brown surface, the mask sets into its eyes two glass discs, white at the sclera and warm amber at the iris, fixing the gaze just past the viewer. Above a heavy arched brow the hair gathers into tight volute curls beneath a coiled topknot, framing infant-full features. The distended cheeks and puckered mouth are the old European shorthand for a personified wind, here absorbed by a Mexican folk carver and made native. Hollowed at the reverse to cup a wearer's face, it was carved to be worn, likely in festival or dance, where a masked soplador (a blower) might personify the wind, perhaps a cardinal air, perhaps simply el aire itself. The puffing wind-head is one of the most enduring conceits in European visual culture: the personified breath that crowds the corners of Renaissance and Baroque maps, gusts across painted ceilings, and swells from carved cabinet ornament wherever an artist wished to give a face to moving air. Its migration into Mexican festival masking illustrates how imported iconography was reworked for local ritual life. The wind character, called a soplador or chiflador in various regions, appears among the companies of dancers in a range of Mexican folk pageants, personifying the breath that gathers rain or drives it off. Guerrero in particular sustains one of the richest masking traditions in Mexico, its village carvers supplying the dance dramas that punctuate the ritual calendar. The theatrical brows and putto curls betray the Old World source, while the local wood and the intent to be worn root the object firmly in the vernacular tradition of the Mexican highlands. Item # 203689

Estimate:$200

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