Maya Jaina Pottery Standing Figure with Skull

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DAY 2 : Pre-Columbian, Ethnographic & Fine Ar...

By Artemis Gallery

Dec 6, 2018

Set Reminder 2018-12-06 10:00:00 2018-12-06 10:00:00 America/New_York Bidsquare Bidsquare : DAY 2 : Pre-Columbian, Ethnographic & Fine Art https://www.bidsquare.com/auctions/artemis-gallery/day-2-pre-columbian-ethnographic-fine-art-3699
Day 2 of an important 2-dy auction featuring ancient and ethnographic art from around the world. Today's sale will feature Pre-Columbian, Native American, African / Tribal, Ethnographic, Spanish Colonial, Fine Art, much more. Artemis Gallery info@artemisgallery.com

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• Lot Description
  Pre-Columbian, Jaina/Campeche Mexico, Maya, Late Classic Period, ca. 600 to 850 CE. One of my favorites! A fascinating, lifelike ceramic figure, portrayed standing, dressed in dramatic finery and holding a skull by a strap in one hand, like a pre-Columbian Hamlet - although here, this is representative of a trophy head. Trophy heads were a near-universal constant in Mesoamerican imagery for millennia. By the Classic Maya period it seems more likely that the taking of actual trophy heads had (mostly) been replaced by the ball from the ballgame (as in the Popol Vuh, where a decapitated head is used instead of a rubber ball). The figure wears a long, thick necklace held near the waist and below the groin with large beads and terminating in two feathers. Size: 4" W x 9.4" H (10.2 cm x 23.9 cm); 10" H (25.4 cm) on included custom stand.
  
  The figure also wears a dramatic belt with a blue loin cloth that hangs down between the legs. A massive headdress topped by two curved horns sits atop the figure's bald head, and the figure also wears a long feather hanging from a round earring on each ear. Elaborately strapped sandals, armlets, and bracelets complete the figure and provide a fantastic idea for us today of what people in the past wore.
  
  Jaina figures, from an island off the Yucatan peninsula, are noted for their lifelike faces and their immense detail. The clothing that this figure wears almost certainly copies the real clothing of a person in the Late Classic Maya period. These figures probably represent actual people and seem likely to have been produced in Campeche and brought to Jaina Island to be buried with the dead. Fascinatingly, the people around Jaina are the only people in southeastern Mesoamerica who put human figures into graves - everywhere else in the region, figures have only been found in domestic contexts. The use of human figures immediately calls to mind the earlier West Mexican cultures that had extensive figures made solely to be placed in their shaft tombs. The Spaniard Diego de Landa, who recorded details of Maya life shortly after the Spanish Conquest, wrote that the artists who created pieces like this one lived lives of religious isolation and ritual, fasting, and abstaining.
  
  Provenance: private southern California, USA collection, acquired in the 1970s to mid-1980s
  
  All items legal to buy/sell under U.S. Statute covering cultural patrimony Code 2600, CHAPTER 14, and are guaranteed to be as described or your money back.
  
  A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids.
  
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  #141063

  Condition

  Limbs are reattached, as is the head, one part of the headdress, and the bottom of the skirt. Light deposits on surface with excellent remaining detail, including pigment.
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