Monumental Veracruz Xipe Totec Figure, Weeping Mask

Pre-Columbian, Mexico, Veracruz, ca. 600–900 CE. A salmon-buff ceramic figure stands frontally, hands raised to the chest, face fixed in a wide-eyed cry. The hollow, mold-and-modeled body carries applied ornament: a broad headband set with two large discs, spool earflares, a thick beaded collar and a diagonal sash crossing the torso. Perforated round eyes, an open mouth and heavy applied teardrops give the head its arresting expression, with brows, tears and lips picked out in black bitumen. The tears and mask-like features support identification as Xipe Totec, the flayed lord of renewal and spring planting. Large figures of this scale were likely funerary offerings, placed in tombs as companions or divine intercessors. Size: 10.5" W x 22.125" H (26.7 cm W x 56.2 cm H).

Xipe Totec, "Our Lord the Flayed One," presided over agricultural renewal, seasonal rebirth, and metalworking. His cult, best documented among the later Aztec, drew on far older Gulf Coast and Oaxacan traditions in which impersonators donned the skin of a sacrificial victim for twenty days until it loosened and split, a visceral analogy for maize bursting its husk and for the earth shedding its dry cover at the first rains. Veracruz ceramicists rendered his attributes in a distinctive vocabulary: doubled or mask-like facial planes, a slack open mouth, and the streaming tears that in Mesoamerican thought bind rain, fertility, and sacrifice into a single image.

The Classic Veracruz workshops of the Gulf lowlands produced large hollow figures in this buff-firing clay, built up from slabs and coils with press-molded heads and applied ornament, then fired at low temperature and finished with black bitumen (chapopote), a naturally occurring asphalt seeping from the region's oil-rich ground. Its use as a cold-applied pigment is a hallmark of Veracruz ceramic sculpture and is rarely encountered outside the Gulf Coast.

Provenance: Collection of Tom Carson, NYS., active 1970’s - early 2000’s, then by descent to family. With Sotheby’s, New York, “Pre-Columbian Art” sale November 20, 1995, lot 327. Listed as property of Mildred Kaplan.

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Item #

73045

Condition
Repaired from approximately twenty-five original pieces with restoration over the break lines.

Buyer's Premium
30%