Olmec Blackware Head Vessel, Flayed-Face Mask, Cinnabar

Pre-Columbian, Mexico, Olmec regions, ca. 1000–600 BCE. A modeled blackware vessel in the form of a human head, the burnished surface pulled to a lustrous graphite sheen and the mouth thrown wide in a howl. Lidded, framed eyes sit beneath an incised cranial band, coiled ears flank the face, and a few grains of cinnabar cling within the eye slits. Mouth and eyes are rendered in a doubled layer, a detail read by Ken Bower (The Lands Beyond Gallery) as the wearing of a flayed-skin mask... possibly one of the earliest depictions of a priest of the later deity Xipe Totec. The hollow, open-backed body was likely intended as a container rather than a wearable mask. A rare and forceful example. Size: 9.375" Diam x 7.125" H (23.8 cm Diam x 18.1 cm H).

Xipe Totec, "Our Lord the Flayed One", is attested chiefly in Postclassic central Mexico, where impersonators donned the skins of sacrificial victims during the spring festival of Tlacaxipehualiztli, the doubled features of the flayed hide visible over the wearer's own face. If Bower's reading holds, this vessel pushes the visual vocabulary of that cult back some two millennia into the Preclassic horizon of the Gulf Coast, where hollow ceramic effigies and burnished blackwares were already vehicles for elite and ritual imagery. Cinnabar, ground mercuric sulfide, was reserved across Mesoamerica for high-status burials and cult objects, applied to bone, jade, and ceramic alike... its survival in the eyes here suggests the piece was pigmented rather than merely fired dark.

Provenance: Ex. Lands Beyond Gallery, copy of invoice and letter. Sold to a Maria Perry of Lexington, Kentucky, and loaned to the Kentucky Art Museum in 1989 as part of their “Bluegrass Collectors” exhibit. With copy of loan record / condition report from 1989. Sold with Hindman auctions “Ethnographic & Tribal Art” sale of July 13, 2022.

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Item #

73007

Condition
A few traces of cinnabar remain in the eyes. Overall scattered surface deposits. Intact, excellent condition.

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