Mirror Back with Great Goddess (400–550 CE): Art, History and Details

Mirror Back with Great Goddess (400–550 CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

An important female deity commands the watery scene on the back of this mirror. The face, bordered by ear ornaments and partially hidden by a nose ornament, appears beneath a huge headdress with the fringed eyes and curled proboscis of an abstract butterfly. The deity rests on a shell-studded water band and two adoring humans offer flowers or incense in a bag. Mirrors served as costume ornaments and perhaps were used in rituals to divine the unknown.

Object facts

• Title: Mirror Back with Great Goddess
• Date: 400–550 CE
• Culture: Guatemala(?), Escuintla, Teotihuacán style, Classic Period
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: slate, pigment; other side originally inlaid with polished pyrite mirror
• Dimensions: Overall: 20.1 x 0.2 cm (7 15/16 x 1/16 in.)
• Collection: AA - Mesoamerica
• Department: Art of the Americas
• Accession number: 1989.65

A detail from the museum

This ancient Teotihuacan mirror may have been used in divination rituals.

Collection credit

James Albert and Mary Gardiner Ford Memorial Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Kidder, Alfred Vincent, Jesse D. Jennings, Edwin M. Shook, and Anna O. Shepard. Excavations at Kaminaljuyu, Guatemala. 1946.
• E. H. T. “The Year in Review: Selections 1989.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 77, no. 2 (February 1990): 38–78.
• Young-Sánchez, Margaret. "Veneration of the Dead: Religious Ritual on a Pre-Columbian Mirror-Back." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 77, no. 9 (1990): 326-51.

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.