Mural Fragment with Elite Male and Maguey Cactus Leaves (500–550): Art, History and Details

Mural Fragment with Elite Male and Maguey Cactus Leaves (500–550) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This richly dressed elite male belonged to a row of identical figures who processed along the walls of a patio in one of Teotihuacán’s wealthy apartment compounds. He offers a chant or prayer, materialized in a mouth scroll, along with a flower-filled libation that cascades from one hand. In the other hand, he carries an incense bag. The thorny spines of the maguey cactus, in front and behind, may allude to the offering of precious blood and a ritual beverage made from the cactus’s sap (pulque, a less refined form of tequila). The spines are thrust into objects that may represent bundles or plots of land.

Object facts

• Title: Mural Fragment with Elite Male and Maguey Cactus Leaves
• Date: 500–550
• Culture: Central Mexico, Tlacuilapaxco apartment compound(?), Teotihuacán style, Classic Period
• Type: Painting
• Technique: fresco on wall fragment
• Dimensions: Overall: 83.2 x 116.2 cm (32 3/4 x 45 3/4 in.)
• Collection: AA - Mesoamerica
• Department: Art of the Americas
• Accession number: 1963.252

A detail from the museum

This fragment is from a larger composition that covered the walls of a patio at Teotihuacan.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Berrin, Kathleen, and Clara Millon. Feathered Serpents and Flowering Trees: Reconstructing the Murals of Teotihuacán. [San Francisco, Calif.]: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1988.
• Lee, Sherman E. "Year in Review for 1963." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 50, no. 10 (1963).
• Kubler, George. "The Iconography of the Art of Teotihuacán." Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology, no. 4 (1967).

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.