Nazca Polychrome Vessel with Four Sharks

Pre-Columbian, Peru, Nazca, ca. 100–600 CE. A shoal of four sharks circles this handsome slip-painted vessel, each creature outlined in black and filled with rust, maroon, and deep brown against a cream ground. The form tapers from a rounded base to a slightly flaring rim banded in red, the interior likewise washed red. Three of the sharks bend their bodies into taut U-shapes, jaws gilled with fine parallel strokes and eyes rendered as white-ringed discs, while the fourth swims upright with a jagged dorsal ridge. Nazca potters achieved this palette with mineral slips burnished before firing, an unusually broad range of colors for the ancient Americas. Vessels of this scale served both domestic and funerary purposes, deposited in graves on the arid south coast where the sea's predators carried potent symbolic charge. Size: 6.25" Diam x 7" H (15.9 cm Diam x 17.8 cm H).

The Nazca flourished in the river valleys of Peru's south coast, best known today for the enormous geoglyphs incised into the Pampa de Nazca. Their painted ceramics constitute one of the great colorist traditions of the pre-Hispanic world: as many as a dozen mineral slips, applied before firing and polished to a soft sheen, replaced the resist and incised techniques of the earlier Paracas potters.

Marine creatures recur throughout Nazca iconography, and the shark, along with the killer whale, ranks among the most charged. Both appear in mythic form as the Killer Whale Being, a supernatural often shown clutching a trophy head, linking the ocean's predators to warfare, fertility, and the agricultural abundance that the sea's cold currents made possible. Rendered here without anthropomorphic attributes, the sharks belong to the naturalistic strand of Nazca painting, in which observed animals are stylized into rhythmic, repeating registers that wrap the vessel wall.

Provenance: Ex. Collection of Leo and Beatrice Drimmer, acquired in the 1960’s. To family by descent.

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Item #

73196

Condition
A few very minor paint flakes on the rim, otherwise intact.

Buyer's Premium
30%