Pre-Columbian, Peru, Chavin, ca. 4th to 3rd century BCE. A very rare cotton textile fragment from the Chavin peoples of ancient Peru. The tightly woven fabric is decorated with two fierce zoomorphic visages, both presenting wild eyes and sharp fangs, delineated in natural peach and brown iron-rich pigments. As a wearable and portable artform in which complex imagery was featured, textiles fostered the spread Chavin iconography from the northern coast, where it originated, all the way to the south. Andean textile art began as early as the third millennium BCE and continued to be a medium of artistic expression as well as a medium used for communicating cultural information - religious, social, and political - for thousands of years. Interestingly, in Peru, fabric art preceded ceramics by more than a thousand years. Sometimes designs were woven into the fabric, sometimes they were embroidered, and sometimes, as we see in this example, they were painted onto the fabric. Size: 30.5" W x 12.5" H (77.5 cm x 31.8 cm); 38" W x 16.25" H (96.5 cm x 41.3 cm) with fabric mount
Provenance: private New Jersey, USA collection; ex-private European collection, acquired in the 1990s
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.
We ship worldwide and handle all shipping in-house for your convenience.
#150264
Condition
Textile is a fragment as shown with expected areas of fading, staining, and fraying as shown. However, what has survived has preserved some very striking imagery.