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Lot 35
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Panamanian Macaracas Polychrome Frutera, 4-Panel Avian Motif
Panamanian Macaracas Polychrome Frutera, 4-Panel Avian Motif
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Ca. 500 - 550 CE. Pre-Columbian, Panama, Gran Cocle, Macaracas style. An exceptional polychrome fruitera of the Macaracas ceramic style, the wide, elegantly flared bowl rising from a robust trumpet foot finished in a warm burnished redware slip. The interior is the stage for a virtuosic exercise in geometric painting, the cream-white ground divided into four symmetrical panels by bold intersecting bands of brick red and purple-black, each panel containing a stylized bird rendered in the curvilinear, maze-like line work that is the Macaracas painter's most distinctive signature. The forms dissolve at close inspection into a mesmerizing lattice of nested curves, hooked volutes, and tightly wound spirals, yet resolve from a distance into creatures of unmistakable avian identity, a perceptual oscillation between abstraction and representation that feels almost modern in its sophistication.

The purple pigment, inherited from the preceding Cubita style and refined here into a deep aubergine, works in concert with the brick red and the grayish-inflected slip to produce a palette of unusual subtlety, one that scholars associate with specific local clay and pigment sources in the Gran Cocle region of central Panama. A secondary undulating band with pendant tick marks circles the exterior rim, the outer body left in its burnished terracotta simplicity, allowing the interior program its full authority.

The Gran Cocle tradition produced some of the most graphically inventive ceramics in the pre-Columbian Americas, and the Macaracas style represents its most refined expression. Footed bowls of this form and decorative ambition were prestige objects, almost certainly associated with elite feasting and ceremonial contexts in a society whose goldwork and polychrome pottery together constitute one of the ancient world's more dazzling aesthetic achievements.

Provenance: Private collection of S. Saunders, Nogales Arizona, USA collection

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Item # 201745

  • Condition: Professionally repaired with restoration and repainting over break lines. Some nicks and abrasions to surface, commensurate with age. Otherwise, very nice presentation with good pigments and detail. Scattered mineral deposits to surface.

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by Artemis Fine Arts
June 25, 2026 9:00 AM MDT
686 S. Taylor Avenue
Suite 108
Louisville, CO, US 80027

Artemis Fine Arts

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$2,000 $4,999 $250
$5,000 $9,999 $500
$10,000 $19,999 $1,000
$20,000 $49,999 $2,500
$50,000 $99,999 $5,000
$100,000 $199,999 $10,000
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