Pedestal Bowl (c. 900–1519): Art, History and Details

Pedestal Bowl (c. 900–1519) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The nobility may have used these goblets for a chocolate beverage or for pulque, made from the fermented sap of the maguey cactus. Both are painted with the precision and brilliant colors for which the Mixteca-Puebla style is renowned, and they carry some of the same motifs, such as the band of stylized animal heads at the top. The smaller bowl has a rattle base.

Object facts

• Title: Pedestal Bowl
• Date: c. 900–1519
• Culture: Mexico, Cholula?, Mixteca-Puebla Style, 10th-16th century
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: earthenware with colored slips
• Dimensions: Diameter: 14.4 x 18.6 cm (5 11/16 x 7 5/16 in.); Overall: 14.6 cm (5 3/4 in.)
• Collection: AA - Mesoamerica
• Department: Art of the Americas
• Accession number: 1951.317

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• "Illustrations." Liturgical Arts 23, no. 3 (May 1955): 101-120.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, and Jenifer Neils. The World of Ceramics: Masterpieces from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Museum in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1982.
• Kubler, George. The Art and Architecture of Ancient America: The Mexican, Maya, and Andean Peoples. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1984.

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.