Andean Art at Dumbarton Oaks presents the Andean portion of the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art. It superbly illustrates all 133 Andean objects in color plates, and includes many complementary and comparative black-and-white illustrations and drawings. The body of Pre-Columbian art that Robert Bliss carefully assembled over a half-century between 1912 and 1963, and which has been amplified slightly since his death, is a remarkably significant collection. These works of art are among the finest examples of the visual arts produced by Andean cultures.
This Andean volume is the first in a series of four catalogues that will treat the entirety of the Bliss Pre-Columbian collection; the others planned will focus on objects from eastern Mesoamerica (Olmec and Maya), western Mesoamerica (Teotihuacan, Veracruz, Mixtec, and Aztec), and Lower Central America.
Andean Art is composed of five topical essays, shorter essays on the Andean cultures represented in the collection, and discussions of the individual objects. These were written by specialists in Pre-Columbian art, presenting the latest in scholarly thinking on Andean cultures and the objects. All thirteen authors bring broad perspectives from Andean culture history, archaeology, and art history to their contributions, but they focus their attentions primarily on the objects themselves, in order to provide meaningful contexts for them and to highlight how these objects, as works of art created and used purposefully, reveal special qualities of Andean culture.
The reader is provided with a fine sense of how the creators and original owners of the pieces in the Bliss collection used and valued these artworks on many levels. The authors also place individual objets alongside others of their type in so far as possible. An extraordinary feature of this volume is the technical descriptions of the metal objects provided by metals specialist Heather Lechtman.
Olmec Art at Dumbarton Oaks presents the Olmec portion of the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art. It illustrates all thirty-nine Olmec art objects in color plates and includes many complementary and comparative black-and-white illustrations and drawings. The body of Pre-Columbian art that Robert Bliss carefully assembled over a half-century between 1912 and 1963, amplified only slightly since his death, is a remarkably significant collection. In addition to their aesthetic quality and artistic significance, the objects hold much information regarding the social worlds and religious and symbolic views of the people who made and used them before the arrival of Europeans in the New World.
This volume is the second in a series of catalogues that will treat objects in the Bliss Pre-Columbian Collection. The majority of the Olmec objects in the collection are made of jade, the most precious material for the peoples of ancient Mesoamerica from early times through the sixteenth century. Various items such as masks, statuettes, jewelry, and replicas of weapons and tools were used for ceremonial purposes and served as offerings.
Karl Taube brings his expertise on the lifeways and beliefs of ancient Mesoamerican peoples to his study of the Olmec objects in teh Bliss collection. His understanding of jade covers a broad range of knowledge from chemical compositions to geological sources to craft technology to the symbolic power of the green stone. Throughout the book the author emphasizes the role of jade as a powerful symbol of water, fertility, and particularly, of the maize plant which was the fundamental source of life and sustenance for the Olmec. The shiny green of the stone was analogous to the green growth of maize. This fundamental concept was elaborated in specific religious beliefs, many of which were continued and elaborated by later Mesoamerican peoples, such as the Maya. Karl Taube employs his substantial knowledge of Pre-Columbian cultures to explore and explicate Olmec symbolism in this catalogue.
The final installment in the definitive series of catalogues of the Robert Woods Bliss Collection, Pre-Columbian Art from Central America and Colombia at Dumbarton Oaks examines a comprehensive and expertly curated collection of jade and gold objects from Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia. This lavish catalogue provides over two hundred detailed and illustrated descriptions of objects that span approximately two millennia. Illustrated in detail with hundreds of high-quality photographs in full color and with stunning clarity, these breathtaking works of art reveal the ingenuity, skill, and vision of Indigenous artists and artisans.
With a dozen accompanying chapters by thirty contributors from the United States, Europe, and Latin America, this landmark publication describes the objects in the context of a history of the collection, production techniques, technical analyses, iconographic interpretations, and evaluations of material from specific archaeological sites. Pre-Columbian Art from Central America and Colombia at Dumbarton Oaks is a major watershed in the archaeology of the Isthmo-Colombian Area, representing an essential contribution to scholarship on fascinating cultures from an area located between Mesoamerica and the Andes, with ties to the Antilles and Amazonia, in the center of the Americas.
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