Tunic with Profile Animal and Human Heads (c. 700–1100): Art, History and Details

Tunic with Profile Animal and Human Heads (c. 700–1100) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Wari tunics are made of two long panels folded at the shoulder line and stitched together at center and side seams, with openings left for the head and arms. The looms on which the panels were woven measured about 80 x 20 inches, with the warps spanning the short dimension. Thus, the warps are horizontal rather than vertical in the garment as it was worn. This orientation is unusual and seems to have influenced the construction of later Inca tunics. In this example, the imagery comprises two profile heads that alternate, one a human and the other an animal that may represent a deer or a bat. Such tunics were luxury goods worn only by privileged individuals.

Object facts

• Title: Tunic with Profile Animal and Human Heads
• Date: c. 700–1100
• Culture: Peru, South Coast, Wari Culture, Middle Horizon, 8th-12th Century
• Type: Textile
• Technique: camelid fiber, cotton: tapestry weave
• Dimensions: Average: 97.8 x 99.1 cm (38 1/2 x 39 in.)
• Collection: T - Pre-Columbian
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1949.12

Collection credit

Gift of John Wise

Further reading listed by the museum

• Society of the Four Arts (Palm Beach, Fla.), and Gordon F. Ekholm. Pre-Columbian Art, the Native Art of America Before the Conquest: Jan. 10-Feb. 1, 1953. Palm Beach: Society of the Four Arts, 1952.
• Shepherd, Dorothy. "Some Recent Acquisitions of Peruvian Textiles." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 37, no. 8 (October 1950): 179-180.
• Wadsworth Atheneum, Adelyn Dohme Breeskin, and Charles Crehore Cunningham. 2000 Years of Tapestry Weaving: A Loan Exhibition : Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Dec. 7, 1951 to Jan. 27, 1952 ; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Feb. 27, 1952 to Mar. 25, 1952. Hartford, Conn: Wardsworth Atheneum], 1951.

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.