Pre-Columbian cloth. Nazca culture, ca. 200 B.C.-700 A.D.

Pre-Columbian cloth. Nazca culture, ca. 200 B.C.-700 A.D.
Gauze and camelid fiber.
With export permit.
Provenance: F. Cervera Collection.
Condition: fragmentary, with losses, tears, stains, general wear, irregularities on the edges and chromatic alterations in accordance with the antiquity.
Measurements: 23 x 42 cm., 43 x 53 cm. with frame.

Pre-Columbian textile fragment belonging to the Nazca culture, made of camelid fiber using the gauze technique. The piece conserves an ornamental composition organized in stripes, with a wide smooth zone in natural tone and decorative bands in red, ochre and yellow.

The lower band presents a succession of stylized zoomorphic motifs, probably birds, framed by geometric borders of stepped fretwork. The vertical bands reinforce the compositional structure of the textile and show the Nazca taste for rhythm, repetition and symbolic clarity of the motifs.

Despite its fragmentary state, the textile retains a remarkable archaeological and visual strength. Textiles occupied an essential place in pre-Columbian Andean cultures, both for their ceremonial value and for their social and symbolic function, and in the Nazca world they reached an extraordinary technical and chromatic development.