Remojadas Seated Woman, Monumental Ceramic Figure

Pre-Columbian, Mexico, Veracruz, Remojadas, ca. 600–1100 CE. A monumental salmon-toned ceramic woman sits cross-legged, hands resting open on her lap, fingernails crisply modeled. She wears a hood and cape falling in a zigzag hem across the back, a double strand of beaded necklace, small disc earspools, and beaded bracelets. The face is arrestingly alert: heavy lidded eyes, broad nose, parted lips baring the upper teeth. Traces of red pigment survive over a white ground, the remnants of once brighter surface decoration. Hollow-built and hand-modeled at near life scale for the head and torso, the figure belongs to a class of Gulf Coast effigies interred in fragments, apparently broken deliberately as part of ritual deposition. Several scholars associate such seated women with a deity linked to childbirth. Size: 15.5" W x 22" H (39.4 cm W x 55.9 cm H).

The Remojadas tradition of south-central Veracruz produced the most ambitious hollow ceramic sculpture in Mesoamerica, worked in a fine sandy clay and finished with chapopote (natural bitumen) and mineral pigments. Its large seated and standing figures were fired in open pits, a feat of kiln control given wall thickness and scale, and the great majority survive only because they were reassembled from sherds.

The recurrent recovery of these figures in broken condition is not simply an accident of burial. Fragmentation patterns at Gulf Coast sites suggest that many effigies were shattered at the moment of deposition, an act of ritual "killing" that released or neutralized the animate charge attributed to the image. Seated, hooded women of this type have been read as embodiments of a maternal or generative deity, the divine counterpart of the cihuateteo of later Nahua belief: women who died in childbirth and were honored as warriors fallen in battle.

Provenance: Collection of Tom Carson, NYS., active 1970’s - early 2000’s, then by descent to family. C.f. “Rediscovered Masterpieces of Mesoamerica” Graulich and Delataille, 1985, Plate 94”. C.f. “Tresors du Nouveau Monde”, Delataille and Delataille, 1992, Plate 112.

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Item #

73042

Condition
Some remaining traces of red on white surface pigment. Repaired from approximately thirty original pieces with old restoration over the break lines, missing two fingers and both feet, (one foot fragment is unattached). Missing the front brim of her hood. Would respond well to a proper restoration.

Buyer's Premium
30%