Bring your auction to collectors worldwide!
Get listed nowBy subscribing, you are agreeing to the privacy policy. Unsubscribe anytime.
Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Ethnographical / Jalisco Terracotta Seated Hunchback Figure - Ritual Scarification
Pre-Columbian, Mexico, Jalisco. A hunched figure modeled in warm buff terracotta draws the body inward: knees propped high, arms folded and crossed atop them, the torso leaning forward as though caught mid-contemplation. The elongated cranium and slit-cut eyes flanking a prominent, sharply ridged nose mark the piece unmistakably as West Mexican work of the Jalisco style. Raised clay pellets stipple the shoulders and back, evoking the ritual scarification or dermal ornament that distinguished status and identity among these communities. The pronounced spinal curvature identifies the subject as a hunchback, a form recurrent in Jalisco funerary sculpture. Such figures, likely interred within shaft tombs, may have served as companions for the dead, embodying individuals accorded special regard for their perceived proximity to the supernatural. The shaft-tomb tradition of West Mexico (Jalisco, Nayarit, and Colima) flourished from roughly the last century BCE into the early centuries CE, producing hollow and solid ceramic figures placed in deep, chambered burials. Hunchbacked and otherwise physically distinctive individuals appear repeatedly in this corpus. Rather than caricature, such depictions likely reflected a belief that those set apart by physical difference held privileged access to spiritual power, a role echoed across many Mesoamerican cultures where dwarves and hunchbacks attended rulers and deities. Item # 203740
Estimate:£151.34
Sold for:-
View all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorEthnographical
Hammer price:
-
Estimate:
£151.34
OCT 23 | 8:00 AM
OCT 27 | 4:00 PM
Bring your auction to collectors worldwide!
Get listed nowEst: £1,285.48
A COPPER INLAID BRASS FIGURE OF A YOGI, PROBABLY PADAMPA SANGYE
11/02/2025
£167,123.6
Est: £195,824
£126.91
OCT 17 | 10:00 PM
