Seated Male Figure (c. 200 CE): Art, History and Details

Seated Male Figure (c. 200 CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

A female once accompanied this abstract male. The two may have had the same meaning as the nearby couple. They were also similarly linked by physical form, though the female’s head had no projections, the meaning of which is unknown. The size of the circle formed by the arms suggests that the figure once held something, perhaps a perishable offering.

Object facts

• Title: Seated Male Figure
• Date: c. 200 CE
• Culture: Mexico, Jalisco, Zacatecas Style
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: earthenware with colored slips
• Dimensions: Overall: 40.6 x 23.1 x 19.5 cm (16 x 9 1/8 x 7 11/16 in.)
• Collection: AA - Mesoamerica
• Department: Art of the Americas
• Accession number: 1990.268

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 (1992): 234-75.

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.