An Aztec stone serpent, ca. A.D. 1400-1521

tightly coiled upon itself with its head nestled on top of the five rattle tail, the faint remains of the forked tongue extended below, and with small recessed eyes; in deep grey basalt. 

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 
Collection of Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, No. 41:1; acquired from the above in 1941

New York, "America, Oceania, Africa", Pierre Matisse Gallery, 1936, cat. no. 1
Buffalo, "Pan-American Month", Buffalo Historical Society, 1943
Baltimore, "4,000 Years of Modern Art", Baltimore Museum of Art, 1956, cat. no. 31, (traveled to Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, New York and Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh
Columbus, "Latin American Art", Ohio Historical Society Museum, 1957

Buffalo Courier-Express Pictorial, Sunday, March 2, 1941, p. 3, illus.
The Evening Sun, Balitmore, Friday, November 23, 1956, p. 31, illus.
Steven A. Nash, with Katy Kline, Charlotta Kotik and Emese Wood, Albright-Knox Art Gallery: Painting and Sculpture from Antiquity to 1942, Buffalo, New York, 1979, p. 136

According to Bernal Diaz's 15th C. notes, rattesnakes were kept at Moctezuma's court at Tenochtitlan, "They had vipers in this accursed house and poisonous snakes which have something that sounds like a bell on the end of their tails. These.... are kept in great pottery vessels full of feathers in which they laid their eggs and reared their young" (Baquedano 1984:73).
The snake's ability to shed his skin gave them a particularly strong connection to renewal and transformation; for a coiled serpent at the American Museum of Natural History, see Pasztory (1983: pl. 217).