A PRE-HISPANIC TERRACOTTA FUNERARY URN AND COVER, TOLIMA CULTURE, 11TH-16TH CENTURY

拍品描述

A PRE-HISPANIC TERRACOTTA FUNERARY URN AND COVER, TOLIMA CULTURE, 11TH-16TH CENTURY Scientific Analysis Report: A thermoluminescence analysis report issued by QED Laboratoire on 28 April 2017, based on sample number QED1716/BP-0109, sets the firing date of the two samples taken between 500 and 1000 years ago, consistent with the dating above. A copy of the report accompanies this lot. Expert authentication: Gloria Inés Mejía, on behalf of the Pre-Columbian Art Investment Company, has examined the present lot and confirmed its authenticity, attribution, and dating as stated above. A copy of Ms. Mejía’s signed expertise accompanies the lot. Gloria Inés Mejía is a Brussels-based specialist in pre-Columbian art who has devoted several decades to the study of the artistic traditions of the ancient Americas. Associated with the Pre-Columbian Art Investment Company, through which she has documented and certified works in public and private collections, her longstanding expertise in the field has earned her a prominent place within the broader European tradition of scholarship and collecting devoted to the study of the material culture of the Americas before 1500. Colombia, Middle Magdalena River Valley. Skillfully potted, the bulbous body tapering towards the flat base, with gently rounded shoulders neatly incised with linear decorative designs and fitted with four small loop handles, rising to a cylindrical neck, decorated with a rope-like braided band. The broad circular mouth of the vessel is covered by a domed lid surmounted by a stylized human figure seated on a throne with his hands resting on his knees, his nude body displaying his male attributes, and his flat, rectangular face rendered with schematically delineated features. Dimensions: Height 78.3 cm (incl. cover) In the Magdalena River Valley, ancient funerary rituals associated with preparing the deceased for the journey to the afterlife included the practice of secondary burial in urns such as this example. This funerary practice involved two distinct stages: the deceased was first interred for a ritually prescribed period and subsequently exhumed and reburied in an urn, possibly as part of a large communal ceremony. Urns have been found in shaft tombs with lateral chambers containing up to seventy urns, each holding charred bone remains, large fractured bones, and fragments of skull. Scholars have associated the use of funerary urns with beliefs linking bones to the afterlife. As Armand Labbé has noted, among a number of Indigenous societies in Central and South America, bones were understood as a form of seed from which new life might emerge. In the Colombian context, the placement of bones within cylindrical, phallic urns, themselves deposited in the womb-like space of shaft-and-chamber tombs within the earth, has been interpreted as a material expression of a return to a primordial, life-generating realm, the dwelling place of kin and ancestors, as well as the source of lives yet to come. See Armand Labbé, Colombia Before Columbus. The People, Culture, and Ceramic Art of Prehispanic Colombia, 1986, p. 118. Literature comparison: Compare a closely related funerary urn, Colombia, Middle Magdalena archaeological region, dated 8th-16th century, 32.5 cm high, in the Museo Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá. Compare a closely related funerary urn, Colombia, Middle Magdalena archaeological region, dated 10th-16th century, in the collections of the Banco de la República de Colombia.

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