Nazca Pottery Polychrome Bowl w/ Underworld Demons

**First Time At Auction**

Pre-Columbian, South Coast Peru, Nazca, ca. 100 to 400 CE. A hand-built and highly-burnished pottery bowl with a rounded base, flared walls, a thin rim, and a shallow interior cavity. A finely-executed decorative program of figural "underworld beings" or "Nazca Cat Demons" comprise the exterior register. Interestingly, the Nazca probably were not very familiar with wild cats - the only feline native to their homeland is the pampas cat, which in life is quite small. Fierce feline features in iconography may have come to the Nazca from contact with other Peruvian cultures. Size: 8" Diameter (20.3 cm).

This style of painting corresponds to later Nazca styles, when supernatural figures became the center of the artists' attention and their more fantastical elements - here three figures with enormous zoomorphic masks - are emphasized over their human ones. Nazca pottery was made using the coil and smoothing technique, never molded; their wide range of polychrome slips included pigments made with minerals like hematite, limonite, and magnetite, as well as white kaolin clay. Colored portions of the vessel were painted with brushes made from llama and alpaca fur, and then given black outlines.

Provenance: private Ventura County, California, USA collection

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#129479
Condition Report: Repaired from several pieces with small losses and light adhesive residue along break lines. Age-commensurate surface wear, with small chips to rim, walls, and base. Light fading to some areas of pigmentation. Nice mineral deposits throughout.