Panel with Royal Woman
sculptor K’in Lakam Chahk
and Jun Nat Omootz
c. 795
- Medium
- limestone
- Classification
- Sculpture
- Dimensions
- Overall: 60.4 x 69.8 cm (23 3/4 x 27 1/2 in.)
- Culture
- Guatemala or Mexico, Usumacinta River region, Maya style
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Art of the Americas
- Credit line
- Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
In this panel, probably from a palace interior, the woman’s static posture contrasts with the liveliness of the creature she holds, a god of royalty with a serpent leg and a grotesque head with a smoking torch on its brow. (The same deity is shown in the nearby Eccentric Flint.) Other signs of high rank are her jade jewelry and costume, its beauty suggesting that textiles and featherwork were great Maya arts, now lost to a tropical climate. The hieroglyphics refer to an undefined ritual that the woman completed in 795.
