Colima Vessel

Emile Deletaille, Brussels, acquired in 1966

Roger Stallaert, Brussels, acquired from the above in 1968

Lin and Emile Deletaille, Brussels, acquired from the estate of the above in 2019

Thence by descent

Brussels, Société Générale de Banque, Art de Mésoamérique - Meso-Amerikaanse kunst, November 17, 1976 - January 8, 1977

Société Générale de Banque, Art de Mésoamérique - Meso-Amerikaanse kunst, Brussels, 1976, fig. 40

The tradition of Colima vessels modeled with a horned effigy head or larger scale vessels with a series of horned effigy heads is a well-documented subcategory of Colima sculpture. See Cleveland Museum of Art, Acc. No. 1990.262. 

The bottle has an unusual decorative scheme with sixteen diminutive anthropomorphic heads sporting horned headdresses.

The interpretation of the headdress horn as that of a shaman was brought to the fore by Peter Furst in the 1960s. Mark Graham (The Iconography of Rulership in Ancient West Mexico, 1998, pp. 191 - 203) has proposed that the ‘horned’ projection was a sliver of a conch shell, which was a symbol of authority and rulership.