Textile Fragment with Cotton Goddess (800–500 BCE): Art, History and Details

Textile Fragment with Cotton Goddess (800–500 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The figure painted on this fragment represents a female deity with a large, fanged mouth. Further fanged heads occur on the chest, legs, feet, waist, and staffs of authority she holds. Edging both the staffs and the top of the head are white cotton bolls that have caused the deity to be dubbed the Cotton Goddess and associated with nature’s fertility.

Object facts

• Title: Textile Fragment with Cotton Goddess
• Date: 800–500 BCE
• Culture: Andes, south coast, Ica Valley?, Chavín style
• Type: Textile
• Technique: Cotton, pigments
• Dimensions: Overall: 34.3 x 36.2 cm (13 1/2 x 14 1/4 in.); Mounted: 39.1 x 41.3 cm (15 3/8 x 16 1/4 in.)
• Collection: T - Pre-Columbian
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 2017.56

A detail from the museum

The fragment comes from a larger textile, perhaps a ceremonial hanging.

Collection credit

Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Patricia Lyon, “Female Supernaturals in Ancient Peru,” Nawpa Pacha, vol. 16 (1978).
• Junius B. Bird Pre-Columbian Textile Conference, Junius Bouton Bird, Ann Pollard Rowe, Elizabeth P. Benson, and Anne-Louise Schaffer. The Junius B. Bird Pre-Columbian Textile Conference, May 19th and 20th, 1973. 1979.
• Cordy-Collins, Alana. An Iconographic Study of Chavín Textiles from the South Coast of Peru: The Discovery of a Pre-Columbian Catechism. Ann Arbor, Mich: University Microfilms International, 1980.

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.