Rare Chavin Textile Fragment w/ Zoomorphic Faces

Pre-Columbian, Peru, Chavin, ca. 4th to 3rd century BCE. A very rare cotton textile fragment from the Chavin peoples of ancient Peru. The tightly woven fabric is decorated with two fierce zoomorphic visages, both presenting wild eyes and sharp fangs, delineated in natural peach and brown iron-rich pigments. As a wearable and portable artform in which complex imagery was featured, textiles fostered the spread Chavin iconography from the northern coast, where it originated, all the way to the south. Andean textile art began as early as the third millennium BCE and continued to be a medium of artistic expression as well as a medium used for communicating cultural information - religious, social, and political - for thousands of years. Interestingly, in Peru, fabric art preceded ceramics by more than a thousand years. Sometimes designs were woven into the fabric, sometimes they were embroidered, and sometimes, as we see in this example, they were painted onto the fabric. Size: 30.5" W x 12.5" H (77.5 cm x 31.8 cm); 38" W x 16.25" H (96.5 cm x 41.3 cm) with fabric mount

Provenance: private New Jersey, USA collection; ex-private European collection, acquired in the 1990s

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#150264 Dimensions: Condition Report: Textile is a fragment as shown with expected areas of fading, staining, and fraying as shown. However, what has survived has preserved some very striking imagery.