Head of a Young Noble (746): Art, History and Details

Head of a Young Noble (746) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This young noble may be a political official of 8th-century Copán, an important site in eastern Maya territory. The noble, who embodies the Maya ideal of masculine beauty, wears circular ear ornaments and a headband, above which the tied hair rises. The meaning of the disembodied hand that cups the chin is debated. The head, collected by Harvard archaeologists in the 1890s, comes from the facade of a building may have been used as a council house by a Copán ruler and his advisors during a crisis that rocked the city’s ruling dynasty. On the structure’s upper level, above woven mat signs that symbolized political authority, eight figures were enthroned in T-shaped recesses. This head is from one of these figures. Beneath each recess was a hieroglyph thought to name an important town (or family) within Copán’s domain. The figures may represent these towns’ advisors to the king, whose image crowned the structure.

Object facts

• Title: Head of a Young Noble
• Date: 746
• Culture: Honduras, Copán, Structure 10L-22A, Maya style (250-900)
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: stone
• Dimensions: Overall: 53.3 x 35.6 x 52.1 cm (21 x 14 x 20 1/2 in.); Former: 52.8 x 35.3 cm (20 13/16 x 13 7/8 in.)
• Collection: AA - Mesoamerica
• Department: Art of the Americas
• Accession number: 1953.154

Collection credit

Gift of the Hanna Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Milliken, William M. "Mayan Head." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 41, no. 4 (April 1954): 63-64.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.

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.