For this thesis, I travelled to the Snite Museum of Art on Notre Dame University’s campus in South Bend, Indiana. I chose this particular museum for the simple fact that I had indubitably limited transportation and time windows. The piece of art that will be discussed in this theses is the Human/jaguar transformation head on a tenon. The artwork was a gift to the Snite museum I visited from a gentleman known as Peter David Joralemon in 2005. Properly displayed within the Snite, the viewer can examine the piece from all angles except the bottom. It sits in a display case upright as it was meant to be viewed. Before this, the artwork resided within Veracruz or rather Tabasco, Mexico. This is believed to be the head’s original creation region.
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More specifically, this sculpture depicts the cranium of a non-particular ruler. This metamorphosis is most likely the effect of an attempt to enter the spirit world to secure the favor of the gods for his people. The artist or architect of this piece was not mentioned on the placard nor anywhere in the vicinity of the piece’s case. It’s safe to assume the creator’s name has long been forgotten. The one piece of information that is known is that this piece was created in honor of the olmec culture. This particular sculpture is perceived to be created in the early-middle preclassic periods. To be specific, it’s creation falls from 1500-400 B.C. The human/jaguar head is composed of a material known as basalt. This is a dark, fine-grained volcanic rock that sometimes displays a columnar structure. The head’s scale is rather large. Displayed in the current method that it is at the Snite, the sculpture is approximately a little less than three feet tall. The tenon the head rests upon may originally have been mounted on or imbedded in a wooden or stone sculpture of a ruler. Another possible theory is that the work may have been placed on the facade of a stone
More specifically, this sculpture depicts the cranium of a non-particular ruler. This metamorphosis is most likely the effect of an attempt to enter the spirit world to secure the favor of the gods for his people. The artist or architect of this piece was not mentioned on the placard nor anywhere in the vicinity of the piece’s case. It’s safe to assume the creator’s name has long been forgotten. The one piece of information that is known is that this piece was created in honor of the olmec culture. This particular sculpture is perceived to be created in the early-middle preclassic periods. To be specific, it’s creation falls from 1500-400 B.C. The human/jaguar head is composed of a material known as basalt. This is a dark, fine-grained volcanic rock that sometimes displays a columnar structure. The head’s scale is rather large. Displayed in the current method that it is at the Snite, the sculpture is approximately a little less than three feet tall. The tenon the head rests upon may originally have been mounted on or imbedded in a wooden or stone sculpture of a ruler. Another possible theory is that the work may have been placed on the facade of a stone