Mirror Back with Great Goddess
400–550 CE
- Medium
- slate, pigment; other side originally inlaid with polished pyrite mirror
- Classification
- Sculpture
- Dimensions
- Overall: 20.1 x 0.2 cm (7 15/16 x 1/16 in.)
- Culture
- Guatemala(?), Escuintla, Teotihuacán style, Classic Period
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Art of the Americas
- Credit line
- James Albert and Mary Gardiner Ford Memorial Fund
- 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 Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
An important female deity commands the watery scene on the back of this mirror. The face, bordered by ear ornaments and partially hidden by a nose ornament, appears beneath a huge headdress with the fringed eyes and curled proboscis of an abstract butterfly. The deity rests on a shell-studded water band and two adoring humans offer flowers or incense in a bag. Mirrors served as costume ornaments and perhaps were used in rituals to divine the unknown.
