Cleveland Museum of Art
Head from a Building's Façade
- Date
- 250–900 CE
- Medium
- stucco, paint
- Culture
- Mexico, Campeche, Maya style (250-900)
- Department
- Art of the Americas
- Institution
- Cleveland Museum of Art
The Maya often lavishly decorated the exteriors of buildings, transforming them into elaborate sculptural works in their own right. This sensitively modeled head, made from fragile stucco, would have been affixed to the façade of a palace or temple via the tenon (projection) at the back of the head. The rest of the body may have been modeled separately. Maya elites practiced cranial modification on infants to achieve the sloped profile seen in this tenoned head.
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