Veracruz Ceramic Whistle, Enthroned Lord, Openwork Disc

Pre-Columbian, Mexico, Gulf Coast, Veracruz, ca. 550–950 CE. A salmon-buff pottery whistle in which a dignitary sits enthroned upon an openwork disc, its pierced field cut with stepped-fret motifs and framed by a rope-twist rim. He raises both hands palms outward, crowned by a broad fan-shaped feathered headdress above a stepped, striated coiffure, and wears disc ear ornaments, a beaded collar and an ankle-length garment. A long tubular stem projects from the disc, terminating in the rectangular fipple aperture that gives the instrument its voice. Moldmade and hand-finished, whistles of this type sounded in ritual processions and burials along the Gulf Coast, where sound and image worked together, the wheel perhaps solar, the seated figure perhaps a ruler or deity impersonator. Size: 12" W x 4" H (30.5 cm W x 10.2 cm H).

Classic-period Gulf Coast workshops produced ceramic aerophones in extraordinary variety, from Remojadas smiling-face figures with whistle chambers to the multi-chambered flutes and ocarinas of central Veracruz. The combination here of a figural finial and a pierced circular plaque with a projecting duct is unusual, and the openwork field with its stepped-fret and volute vocabulary belongs to the same decorative grammar seen on Veracruz yokes, palmas and scroll-carved stone.

Music in Mesoamerica was rarely entertainment alone. Aerophones accompanied processions, ballgame ceremony and the interment of the dead, and their high, breathy timbre was understood to carry across the boundary between the living and the ancestral. The stem's fipple is intact and the instrument's original voice remains legible in its construction.

Provenance: Ex. Musical Museum, Phoenix, AZ.,Ex. Arte Primitivo NYC., auction 57, lot 235. Private Canadian collection.

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Item #

73050

Condition
Repaired from approximately ten original pieces with restoration over the break lines, the outer rim of the sun wheel is partially restored.

Buyer's Premium
30%