Vessel with Butterfly Headdress (1–550 CE): Art, History and Details

Vessel with Butterfly Headdress (1–550 CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The headdress shown on this vessel combines a serpent's mouth with a butterfly's proboscis (feeding tube), which curls between the eyes. The butterfly often appears in the headdress of the Great Goddess, an extremely important Teotihuacán deity. Stucco (paper-thin, painted plaster) is fragile and usually does not survive well; the stucco of the basin in this case has been repaired.

Object facts

• Title: Vessel with Butterfly Headdress
• Date: 1–550 CE
• Culture: Central Mexico, Teotihuacán, Classic period
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: ceramic, stucco, pigment
• Dimensions: Diameter: 15.6 x 15.8 cm (6 1/8 x 6 1/4 in.); Overall: 15.5 cm (6 1/8 in.)
• Collection: AA - Mesoamerica
• Department: Art of the Americas
• Accession number: 1990.231

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. James C. Gruener

Further reading listed by the museum

• Von Winning, Hasso, and Alfred Stendahl. Pre-Columbian Art of Mexico and Central America: Text and Notes by Hasso Von Winning. Selection of Plates by Alfred Stendahl. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1968.
• Young-Sánchez, Margaret. "The Gruener Collection of Pre-Columbian Art." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 79, no. 7 (1992): 234-75.
• Conides, Cynthia. “Figures in Action: Contextualizing the Butterfly Personage at Teotihuacan, Mexico.” In Visual Culture of the Ancient Americas: Contemporary Perspectives. Andrew Finegold and Ellen Hoobler, 103-133. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017.

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.