Colima Musician Figure, Pan Pipes and Rattle, Rare Type

Pre-Columbian, Mexico, Colima, ca. 100 BCE – 200 CE. A tall ceramic performer caught mid-tune, lips pressed to a bank of pan pipes while his raised right hand shakes a gourd rattle. The burnished reddish-brown body carries black resist painting and crisply incised ornament: a broad belted stomach band framing quartered panels, a short loincloth, and a towering crested headdress with punctate fields and a diamond-bordered nape flap. Flaring earspools frame a narrow, sharply modeled face. Musicians rank among the more uncommon subjects in the West Mexican shaft-tomb repertoire, where such figures were interred as companions to the dead, likely evoking the music that accompanied funerary rites and communal ceremony. Size: 16" H (40.6 cm H).

Colima ceramics come almost exclusively from deep shaft-and-chamber tombs cut into the volcanic soils of western Mexico, a mortuary tradition shared with neighboring Nayarit and Jalisco and unparalleled elsewhere in Mesoamerica. The chambers held assemblies of figures, vessels, and the famous plump dogs, arranged less as offerings than as an entourage. Within that repertoire, human figures divide into recognizable social types: warriors with clubs, standard bearers, ballplayers, water carriers, and, more rarely, musicians with drums, conch trumpets, rattles, and pan pipes. The combination here, wind instrument in the mouth and idiophone in the raised hand, suggests a single performer sustaining rhythm and melody at once, a practice documented in later Mesoamerican ritual. The resist decoration was achieved by masking areas of the burnished slip before a smudging firing, leaving the dark linear passages that shadow the polished surface.

Provenance: Ex. Arte Primitivo, auction 73, lot # 27, acquired from Lands Beyond Gallery, NYC., 1992, ex. Guy Wilcox collection, New Jersey.

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Item #

73027

Condition
Scattered mineral deposits on the surface. Both legs reattached and a repaired break line on his back, with restoration over the breaklines, otherwise intact, Excellent condition.

Buyer's Premium
30%