Finial with Bird (Harpy Eagle with Royal Flycatcher Crest?) (400–1000): Art, History and Details

Finial with Bird (Harpy Eagle with Royal Flycatcher Crest?) (400–1000) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This gold finial fit over the end of a staff, an emblem of rank. The bird has the hooked beak of a raptor—perhaps the harpy eagle, the “king” of tropical forests. The enormous crest, however, may be inspired by the Royal Flycatcher, a smaller bird that fans its unique, brilliantly colored crest during mating.

Object facts

• Title: Finial with Bird (Harpy Eagle with Royal Flycatcher Crest?)
• Date: 400–1000
• Culture: Isthmian Region (Colombia), Sinú (Zenú), 5th century-11th century
• Type: Metalwork
• Technique: gold, cast
• Dimensions: Overall: 11.4 x 7.2 x 6 cm (4 1/2 x 2 13/16 x 2 3/8 in.)
• Collection: AA - Intermediate Region
• Department: Art of the Americas
• Accession number: 2015.3

A detail from the museum

A museum visitor corrected our identification of this bird!

Collection credit

Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Seligman, Thomas K., and Kathleen Berrin. The Bay Area Collects: Art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. [San Francisco]: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1982.
• Cleveland Museum of Art. Museum Masters: 2016-17 Companion Guide. [Cleveland, Ohio]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2016.
• Bergh, Susan. "Acquisitions 2015: Pre-Columbian and Native North American Art.” Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 56, no. 2 (March/April 2016): 32-33.

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.