Feathered Serpent (Quetzalcoatl) (1325–1521): Art, History and Details

Feathered Serpent (Quetzalcoatl) (1325–1521) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The museum bought this sculpture in 1941, when study of ancient American arts was in its infancy. It has many odd features, a few perhaps revealing an attempt to make the subject—the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl (Feathered Serpent)—palatable to modern viewers. But it cannot absolutely be declared fake because some real Aztec sculptures are unusual. Analysis of the surface so far provides no help. Especially odd is the arrangement of the coils into bulges that suggest the pectorals, knees, and buttocks of a human body, as though the sculpture represents a human in a serpent costume. Real Aztec sculpture usually portrays the serpent's dangerous body more realistically. Also, the mouth mask—the insignia of a wind deity related to Quetzalcoatl and, thus, perhaps appropriate—is much larger in genuine sculptures. This suggests that, because the mask and its authentic proportion are strange to our eyes, a forger scaled it down. Other uncommon features include the incomplete carving of the ears, the fact that the human head does not emerge from a serpent's mouth, and more.

Object facts

• Title: Feathered Serpent (Quetzalcoatl)
• Date: 1325–1521
• Culture: Central Mexico, Aztec or modern, Post-Classic Period or modern
• Type: Stone
• Technique: stone
• Dimensions: Overall: 27.7 x 20.1 x 22 cm (10 7/8 x 7 15/16 x 8 11/16 in.)
• Collection: AA - Mesoamerica
• Department: Art of the Americas
• Accession number: 1941.46

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Flint Institute of Arts. Art Marches on!: The Opening and Dedicating Exhibition of the New Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, Michigan, November 14-December 13, 1941. Flint, Mich.: The Institute, 1941.
• Flint Institute of Arts. Art Marches on!: The Opening and Dedicating Exhibition of the New Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, Michigan, November 14-December 13, 1941. Flint, Mich: The Institute.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, and Jay I. Kislak Reference Collection (Library of Congress). Art of the Americas. Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1946.

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.