JALISCO SEATED FEMALE WITH INFANT, AMECA-ETZATLÁN STYLE PROTOCLASSIC, CIRCA 100 BC-AD 250

The Lands Beyond, New York

Richard Liroff, New York, acquired from the above on December 17, 1986

The Lands Beyond, New York

Herbert L. Lucas, Los Angeles

American Private Collection, acquired from the above in 2003

Davis Art Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, May 14, 1999-February 12, 2003, long term loan from Herbert L. Lucas

The proud and stylized maternity figures of the Ameca style were important ancient societal figures in West Mexican art. As Townsend notes, ceramic effigies formally displayed status to other spirits of the afterlife, the figures "achieved the appropriate rank and status to hold important ritual functions in life, and that they were therefore entitled to exercise these functions in the afterlife" (Townsend, in Townsend, ed. Ancient West Mexico, The Art and Archaeology of the Unknown Past, Chicago, 1998, p. 135). Ancestral pairs or marital couples are a well known type, but this particular Ameca-Etzatlán maternity style includes individual women representing lineage and kinship status. 

Here the youthful woman holds her young child to her breast, where even the child is depicted at a mature age, wearing a similar headdress to the mother. Sitting erectly with high rounded shoulders she wears beaded armbands, a close-fitting skirt and tall turban secured with a beaded headband. Her face is of classic elongated form with a sharply defined jawline, slender nose, sculpted cheeks and parted and darkened lips showing carefully modeled teeth. Facial paint provides additional ornamentation but was a recognized status marker, here her eyes are framed within the tapered blacked eye masks.  

The strong similarity amongst a small group of Ameca female figures suggests they may be from a single workshop; see Berjonneau, Sonnery and Deletaille, eds., Rediscovered Masterpieces of Mesoamerica, Boulogne, 1985 Fig. 252.