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Drinking Cup (900–1519): Art, History and Details

Drinking Cup at the Cleveland Museum of Art: 900–1519, pottery with burnished, colored slips. Explore the work's context, creator attribution and collection history.

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Drinking Cup (900–1519; Cleveland 1990.212)
Cleveland Museum of Art; Gift of Mr. and Mrs. James C. Gruener · CC0 1.0 / Public Domain

Drinking Cup (900–1519) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

After about the year 800, several Mixtec kingdoms developed in the regions known today as Oaxaca and Puebla in southern Mexico. Mixtec artists excelled in creating small-scale, fine works of art, including polychrome pottery. A Mixtec noble may have used this well-painted goblet to drink chocolate or pulque, a fermented beverage made from the sap of the maguey cactus.

Object facts

  • Title: Drinking Cup
  • Date: 900–1519
  • Culture: Mexico, Cholula(?), Mixteca-Puebla style
  • Type: Sculpture
  • Technique: pottery with burnished, colored slips
  • Dimensions: Overall: 12.5 x 8.5 cm (4 15/16 x 3 3/8 in.)
  • Collection: AA - Mesoamerica
  • Department: Art of the Americas
  • Accession number: 1990.212

A detail from the museum

Pulque, once the drink of gods and rulers, is now available in a can.

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. James C. Gruener

Further reading listed by the museum

  • Young-Sánchez, Margaret. “The Gruener Collection of Pre-Columbian Art.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 79, no. 7 (September 1992): 234–275.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.

Sources

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