Pair of Ear Ornaments (c. 500–200 BCE): Art, History and Details

Pair of Ear Ornaments (c. 500–200 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

There seems to be a link between Chavín religion and appearance of the Andes’ first large precious-metal objects, made using revolutionary new metallurgical processes. Chavín may have developed these technical innovations to express the inexpressible, the "wholly other" nature of its religion. In many areas, elite men and women wore the ornaments as emblems of their ties to this religion, and eventually were buried with them. These 16 objects, along with three others not in the museum’s collection, are said to have come as a group from Chavín itself.

Object facts

• Title: Pair of Ear Ornaments
• Date: c. 500–200 BCE
• Culture: Peru, North Highlands, Chavín de Huantar(?), Chavín style
• Type: Metalwork
• Technique: hammered and cut gold
• Dimensions: Diameter: 9.6 cm (3 3/4 in.); Overall: 2.6 cm (1 in.)
• Collection: AA - Andes
• Department: Art of the Americas
• Accession number: 1957.400

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Tishman

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art. The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, March, 1958.
• The Brummer Gallery Records. Cloisters (Museum), n.d.
• William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, and Ralph T. Coe. The Imagination of Primitive Man: A Survey of the Arts of the Non-Literate Peoples of the World. Kansas City, Mo: The Museum, 1962.

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.