Three Costa Rican Polychrome Figures - Nude Female & Vessels

Pre-Columbian, Costa Rica, Greater Nicoya. A trio of buff-slipped ceramics painted in the black and red-orange vocabulary of Greater Nicoya. The largest is a round-bottomed jar modeled as a bird, its head and flaring tail rendered as opposed lugs, the swollen body banded with chevrons and hatched triangles. The mid-sized tripod stands on tapering supports, its zoomorphic profile suggesting a dog or similar quadruped, girdled by panels of stepped rectangles and dotted lozenges. Smallest is a seated nude female, legs splayed, hands resting on her knees, her brow and limbs striped with body-paint or tattoo designs and her sex frankly indicated. Vessels of this class served in feasting and mortuary deposit, while such figures likely embodied fertility and lineage, buried alongside the dead as companions in the passage beyond. The Greater Nicoya zone, spanning the Guanacaste peninsula of Costa Rica and the Pacific littoral of Nicaragua, produced some of the most inventive polychrome traditions in lower Central America. Potters there worked without the wheel, coiling and paddling their forms before burnishing a pale cream slip and painting in iron-rich reds and manganese blacks. The painted stripes and geometric fields that cover the seated female almost certainly record real body decoration: early Spanish chroniclers described Nicoyan and Chorotega peoples marking themselves with pigment and tattoo, patterns that signaled rank, clan, and readiness for ceremony. Their pottery moved widely along Pacific exchange routes, and the resulting shared repertoire of animal effigies and banded geometry links workshops across a broad stretch of coast. Item # 204264

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