Panel with Royal Woman (c. 795): Art, History and Details

Panel with Royal Woman (c. 795) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is K’in Lakam Chahk; Jun Nat Omootz.

The work and its context

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

In this panel, probably from a palace interior, the woman’s static posture contrasts with the liveliness of the creature she holds, a god of royalty with a serpent leg and a grotesque head with a smoking torch on its brow. (The same deity is shown in the nearby Eccentric Flint.) Other signs of high rank are her jade jewelry and costume, its beauty suggesting that textiles and featherwork were great Maya arts, now lost to a tropical climate. The hieroglyphics refer to an undefined ritual that the woman completed in 795.

Object facts

• Title: Panel with Royal Woman
• Date: c. 795
• Creator attribution: K’in Lakam Chahk; Jun Nat Omootz
• Culture: Guatemala or Mexico, Usumacinta River region, Maya style
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: limestone
• Dimensions: Overall: 60.4 x 69.8 cm (23 3/4 x 27 1/2 in.)
• Collection: AA - Mesoamerica
• Department: Art of the Americas
• Accession number: 1962.32

A detail from the museum

This panel, likely from a palace interior, depicts a royal Maya woman.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Palenque Round Table, Merle Greene Robertson, and Elizabeth P. Benson. Fourth Palenque Round Table, 1980: Proceedings of the Cuarta Mesa Redonda De Palenque, June 8-14, 1980. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute, 1985.
• Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, Juan Pedro Laporte, Héctor L. Escobedo, and Sandra Villagrán de Brady. VI Simposio de investigaciones arqueológicas en Guatemala, 1992: Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología. Guatemala: Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes, 1993.
• Lee, Sherman E. "Year in Review 1962." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 49, no. 9 (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.