Seated Figure Wearing a Skin (600–1000): Art, History and Details

Seated Figure Wearing a Skin (600–1000) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This type of image-showing a human clothed in a sacrificial victim’s skin, visible around the mouth and wrists-is one of the most awesome created by Mesoamerican artists. The figure represents the deity Xipe Totec or a human impersonator. Among the later Aztecs, Xipe was associated with fertility, rain, and renewal. Perhaps the wearer, upon shedding the skin, was conceived as a sprout emerging from a withered husk. Xipe also had military connections.

Object facts

• Title: Seated Figure Wearing a Skin
• Date: 600–1000
• Culture: Mexico, Gulf Coast
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: earthenware, slip
• Dimensions: Overall: 43.3 x 29.2 x 28.7 cm (17 1/16 x 11 1/2 x 11 5/16 in.)
• Collection: AA - Mesoamerica
• Department: Art of the Americas
• Accession number: 1990.246

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. James C. Gruener

Further reading listed by the museum

• Young-Sánchez, Margaret. “The Gruener Collection of Pre-Columbian Art.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 79, no. 7 (September 1992): 234–275.

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.