A PRE COLUMBIAN CARVED EMERALD AMULET OF A FIGURE, LATE CLASSIC OR MUISCA, 550-950 AD

拍品描述

A PRE-COLUMBIAN CARVED EMERALD AMULET OF A FIGURE, LATE CLASSIC OR MUISCA, 550-950 AD Carved from a single crystal of translucent green emerald, the amulet takes the form of a schematic seated figure. The head is squared and surmounted by a triangular headdress or crest, the facial plane reduced to a broad horizontal band suggesting closed eyes or a mouth. The torso is defined by parallel incised lines describing the ribcage, from which the arms fold across the body and meet at the centre. The legs are drawn up in a crouched or seated posture, indicated by chevron-cut striations that terminate at a stepped base. The reverse and sides remain largely in the natural form of the crystal, the carving concentrated on the frontal plane. The frontal, symmetrical composition, the crested head, and the arms folded across a striated torso conform to the schematic anthropomorphic type known from votive and funerary offerings in the northern Andes and adjacent regions. Figures of this kind were worn as pendants or deposited as offerings, the human form reduced to its essential markers, headdress, ribcage, folded limbs, in a manner intended to signify rather than to portray. The verticality of the pose and the emphasis on the ribcage are consistent with a devotional or ancestral function rather than a portrait purpose. The choice of emerald is itself the primary statement of the object. Colombian emerald, drawn from the deposits of the eastern Andean cordillera at Muzo, Chivor, and Somondoco, was the most prestigious material available to the goldsmiths and lapidaries of the region, more restricted in access than gold and reserved for offerings, elite ornament, and ritual deposit. Among the Muisca in particular, emeralds carried associations with fertility, water, and the generative power of the earth, and were placed in tunjo offerings, sacred lakes, and burials as objects of exchange between the human and supernatural orders. To carve the raw crystal rather than facet or polish it preserved the material's identity as a gift of the mountain, and the retention of the natural crystal faces on the sides of the present amulet is consistent with that logic. This amulet exemplifies the pre-Columbian preference for the raw emerald crystal as a devotional medium, in which the material itself carries the greater part of the meaning and the carving supplies only the minimum figural information needed to identify the subject. Worked examples in emerald of this scale are considerably rarer than their counterparts in gold or tumbaga, and the survival of the crystal in this condition, with the figural iconography still legible, places it within a small group of comparable votive objects from the Late Classic to Muisca horizon. Dimensions: Height 2.1 cm

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