Cleveland Museum of Art

Painted Drum

Date

500–1000

Medium

Animal hide, gesso, wooden slats, pigment

Culture

Central Andes, Middle Horizon, North Coast?

Department

Art of the Americas

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

In the 1600s, music was so important to Indigenous Andean ceremonial life that Spaniards destroyed thousands of musical instruments to hasten Natives’ conversion to Christianity. The number of surviving, older instruments suggests that music had similar import in earlier periods. This rare example is painted with a figure wearing a crescent headdress, an emblem of status; it may have been played by a woman. This painted drum may have been played by a woman in antiquity.

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