On view
Eagle effigy vessel,
ca. 1450 CE
More Context
Didactics
Polychrome ceramics were highly refined in both form and design, and demanded laborious manufacturing techniques. This vessel was coil-built from fine-grain clay and shaped with wooden instruments, then allowed to dry to a leather-like consistency. Its surface next was burnished with a smooth stone to prepare it for a cream base slip. Paints were created by adding pigments to slips and carefully applying the colors with brushes of various sizes. Designs were outlined in narrower dark lines. The surface was then smoothed and burnished a second time. Ultimately, each vessel underwent at least one and as many as three firings. The artistic effort is apparent in what was once radiant contrasting color and the intricacy of ornamentation for the beak, eyes, and feathers. The wide distribution of complex technology for producing such pottery, and of an innovative pictographic communication system (referred to as Mixteca-Puebla style) for ornamenting it, provide archaeological evidence of the intensive alliance networks maintained by Eastern Nahuas, Mixtecs, and Zapotecs.
Information
ca. 1450 CE
North America, Mexico, Puebla, Central Mexico
January 18, 1990, Allan L. Long, New York, sold to the Princeton University Art Museum [1].
Notes:
[1] According to a Long invoice in the curatorial file.
- "Acquisitions of the Art Museum 1990," Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 50, no. 1 (1991): p. 16-69., p. 37 (illus.)
- Harmer Johnson, ed. Guide to the Arts of the Americas (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), p. 55 (illus.)
- Felipe Solís, The Aztec Empire: Catalogue of the Exhibition (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2004)., cat. no. 129 (illus.)
- Felipe Solís, The Aztec Empire (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2004)., fig. 153 (illus.)
- John M. D. Pohl, Sorcerers of the Fifth Heaven: Nahua Art and Ritual of Ancient Southern Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Program in Latin American Studies no. 9, 2007)., fig. 25d, p. 44 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 141 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), pg. 308
