The Guennol Taino Stone Trigonolito

Anthony Slayter-Ralph, New York

Alastair Bradley and Edith Martin, acquired from the above in the 1980s

By descent to the present owner

John Antonides, Joanna Ekman, eds, The Guennol Collection, Vol. III, The Brooklyn Museum, 1991, p. 132

“The Taino culture was the most highly developed in the Caribbean when Columbus reached Hispaniola in 1492. [...]The Taino had an extraordinary repertoire of expressive forms in sculpture, …their inventiveness and dynamism were also reflected in their social hierarchies and political organization" (Dicey Taylor, “The Art of the Taino”, in Taino, Pre-Columbian Art & Culture from the Caribbean, New York, 1998, p.41).

The trigonolito, also referred to as three-pointer stones, were a primary form of portable sculpture in the ancient Taino culture of the Greater Antilles. The complex interplay of zoomorphic and anthropomorphic imagery is a highly expressive and diagnostic attribute of the three-pointer objects. It is suggested the triangular form is symbolic of the cassava or yuca plant, an important root crop. The three-pointers portray the zemi figure- the deity and also the spirit essence of natural objects. 

Jesse Fewkes studied the Taino culture in 1903 and described zemi figures as “symbols of deities, idol [...] or anything supposed to have magic power. The designation applied both to the magic power of the sky, the earth, the sun and the moon, as well as to the tutelary ancestors of clans” (quoted in “Zemi Three-Pointer Stones,” Fatima Bercht, et. al., ed., Taino, Pre-Columbian Art and Culture from the Caribbean, New York, 1997).

Zemi figures were made in stone, shell, wood, bone, and an individual would have many versions of them, each was “prized because of the power they were thought to confer. People boasted that theirs were the best, and they passed them on by inheritance, gift, or trade.” (Irving Rouse, The Tainos, New Haven, 1992, p.13). The principal face on this zemi has large concave eyes encircled by the entwined raised band of brows. The mouth is indicated by a narrow groove extending over the tapering point. It is carved overall with numerous spirals in fluid bands.