Head from a Building's Façade (250–900 CE): Art, History and Details

Head from a Building's Façade (250–900 CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The Maya often lavishly decorated the exteriors of buildings, transforming them into elaborate sculptural works in their own right. This sensitively modeled head, made from fragile stucco, would have been affixed to the façade of a palace or temple via the tenon (projection) at the back of the head. The rest of the body may have been modeled separately.

Object facts

• Title: Head from a Building's Façade
• Date: 250–900 CE
• Culture: Mexico, Campeche, Maya style (250-900)
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: stucco, paint
• Dimensions: Overall: 33.2 x 17.5 x 29.7 cm (13 1/16 x 6 7/8 x 11 11/16 in.)
• Collection: AA - Mesoamerica
• Department: Art of the Americas
• Accession number: 1990.183

A detail from the museum

Maya elites practiced cranial modification on infants to achieve the sloped profile seen in this tenoned head.

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. James C. Gruener

Further reading listed by the museum

• Young-Sãnchez, Margaret. "The Gruener Collection of Pre-Columbian Art." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 79, no. 7 (1992): 234-75.

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.