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Source Description

This tunic border shows the love of complementary dualities that is, as art historian Tom Cummins has written, “…a social principal and an aesthetic ideal in the Andes.” In this piece, diagonally divided squares with reversed stepped fret patterns and dots of a contrasting color are interspersed with rectangles featuring two heads of figures with feathered rays emanating from them, demonstrating this duality. These deity figures are very simplified copies of the figure at the center of Tiwanaku's Gateway of the Sun monument, showing a central or solar deity. While the stepped fret is a more abstract symbol, some scholars have suggested that in the extremely arid region of the Nazca Valley, the stepped patterns may actually reference water’s flow along the irrigation channels the Nazca people painstakingly created in their desert region.

Scholar Source Context

Document identity
localId
85462
label
Tunic Border
core
obj
dtoType
object
pageCount
4
Source metadata
id
85462
contentType
object
stage
normalized
title
Tunic Border
description
This tunic border shows the love of complementary dualities that is, as art historian Tom Cummins has written, “…a social principal and an aesthetic ideal in the Andes.” In this piece, diagonally divided squares with reversed stepped fret patterns and dots of a contrasting color are interspersed with rectangles featuring two heads of figures with feathered rays emanating from them, demonstrating this duality. These deity figures are very simplified copies of the figure at the center of Tiwanaku's Gateway of the Sun monument, showing a central or solar deity. While the stepped fret is a more abstract symbol, some scholars have suggested that in the extremely arid region of the Nazca Valley, the stepped patterns may actually reference water’s flow along the irrigation channels the Nazca people painstakingly created in their desert region.
provenance
Purchased by Georgia de Havenon, New York; given to Walters Art Museum, 2016.
date
400-700 CE (?)
rightsUri
CC0
language
en
genreSpecific
panels (costume components)
imageCount
4
pageCount
4
source
import
dimensions
units
cm
width
7.6
height
109.2
dimensionsRaw
H: 3 x L: 43 in. (7.62 x 109.22 cm)
Source extras
cul
Nazca (?); Tiwanaku (?)
style
Pucará
med
camelid fibers
creator_ids
2768
collection_ids
AME
exhibition_ids
2988
Page inventory
seq
1
type
photo
mediaId
6912df48f0e8dc00
hasOcr
no
hasDescription
no
seq
2
type
photo
mediaId
438bf53a6f578b2f
hasOcr
no
hasDescription
no
seq
3
type
photo
mediaId
20df502ac59943d3
hasOcr
no
hasDescription
no
seq
4
type
photo
mediaId
a1f4bc0b533ac1c2
hasOcr
no
hasDescription
no