Pre-Columbian, Gulf Coast Mexico, Veracruz (Vera Cruz), ca. 500 to 700 CE. A highly-detailed and hand-built pottery bust depicting a female figure with her arms held proudly outward. She dons a midriff tunic with fringed borders along the bottom and one sleeve, and wears a pair of small fastened medallions around her neck. Atop her head is an elaborate headdress with a pair of pierced reptilian eyes set above a fanged lower brim - perhaps suggestive of a caiman skull or that of another similar beast - though the midsection containing the telltale snout is missing. "Chapapote," the classic black pigment used in Veracruz artwork made from petroleum-rich deposits, is liberally employed on this example to detail areas of the headdress, eyes, brows, and mouth. Custom wooden display stand included. Size: 9.125" W x 11.1" H (23.2 cm x 28.2 cm); 13.625" H (34.6 cm) on included custom stand.

Excavations near the modern Mexican town of Remojadas have revealed two types of impressive, detailed pottery figures from the Veracruz period: the Sonrientes, the joyous "smiling faces", and figures like this one, more serious, mostly adult figures, with elaborate costumes, themes, and sometimes props that all seem to point towards religious or political ceremonies. These figures are often found with the bodies broken into pieces though with the heads largely intact, as they were ritually destroyed as burial offerings. Their clothing suggests that they depict people of import in society, perhaps priests or nobility.

Provenance: private New York, New York, USA collection; ex-private lifetime collection of Dr. Saul Tuttman and Dr. Gregory Siskind, New York, New York, USA

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#141373

This is a fragment of a larger figure. Losses to lower body, one arm, one hand, and headdress crest, with minor chips to nose, body, and head, and minor abrasions to black pigment. Nice earthen deposits throughout.