Covered Vessel with the Principal Bird and Peccary Heads
Maya (Petén region, Guatemala)
200–300 CE
- Medium
- Ceramic and pigment
- Classification
- Ceramics
- Dimensions
- 24.8 × 25.4 cm (9 3/4 × 10 in.)
- Culture
- Guatemala
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Arts of the Americas
- Credit line
- Joanne M. and Clarence E. Spanjer and African and Amerindian Curator's Discretionary funds; O. Renard Goltra and National Docent Symposium endowments; African and Amerindian Art Purchase Fund; David Soltker and Irving Dobkin endowments
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
This beautifully modeled and incised blackware vessel was likely was once the personal possession of a Maya king, who may have used it to serve food at royal feasts or who may have presented it as a gift to a visiting lord as a sign of alliance. Its shape—a lidded dish supported by four legs—was a form frequently produced during the Early Classic period [A.D. 250/450]. These ceramics often display a consistent set of motifs, with birds on their domed lids and inverted peccary (wild pig) heads serving as supports. The artist who created this piece integrated the two-dimensional surface of the lid with its three-dimensional handle by connecting the bird’s spread wings, lightly incised into the surface, with its head, sculpted in the round. The vessel thus captures the essence of an aquatic bird floating on the surface of the water with its prey—a small fish—caught in its open beak. Water birds and peccaries inhabited the natural landscape of the ancient Maya who associated them with the structure of the universe and the time of creation. The crest of feathers atop the bird’s head, its outstretched wings, and the bulge at the tip of its beak mark it as a cormorant. The Maya regarded…
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
