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114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Arts & Graphics / Four Maya, Aztec & Veracruz Terracotta Heads
Pre-Columbian, Mexico, Maya, Aztec, and Veracruz. A quartet of faces parted from figures long since dispersed, each still holding its expression as though the interruption were only temporary. Two are Veracruz, from the Gulf Coast lowlands: the largest wears a tall incised cap and retains the red mineral pigment once flushed across crown and cheek, its eyes shut beneath weighted lids in that inward calm which reads as sleep, or trance, or death, depending on the mood of the person holding it; the second parts its lips over a neat row of teeth, hairline picked out in fine hatching, kin to the caritas sonrientes of the Remojadas region and their vocabulary of festival, pulque, and the flowered rites of Xochipilli. The third is Maya, pressed from a mold in pale marl clay, wide lentoid eyes and drilled pupils beneath a beaded headdress, great disks of ear ornament flanking the jaw, hollow behind and likely broken from a figurine-whistle of the kind interred along the Campeche coast so the tomb might be furnished with both a companion and a voice. The last is Aztec, and it is a skull: sockets bored deep, dentition bared, darkened by centuries underground. Death was not morbid in Tenochtitlan so much as structural. Mictlantecuhtli presided over the ninth and lowest layer of the underworld, skulls were racked on the tzompantli in their hundreds, and the skeletal face served as standard notation in clay, in stone, and across the painted pages of the codices. Rendered small and portable here, it may have belonged to a household shrine or a modest offering. Together the four compass more than a millennium of Mesoamerican modeling, from Classic Veracruz through the Late Classic Maya lowlands to the eve of the Spanish arrival ... four heads, three cultures, one shared conviction that the human face remains the most efficient carrier of meaning ever devised. Item # 203825
Estimate:$250
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorArts & Graphics
Estimate:
$250
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