Polychrome Terracotta Effigy Vessel

For hundreds of years Costa Rican artists were kept busy producing unique works of art in terracotta and stone. Most of what survives today was placed in elite tombs, buried with their owner who may have hoped for the pleasure of using such lovely objects in the afterlife. From this need for funerary objects a vast variety of very inventive pottery was created. The figure on the front seems to emerge directly from the clay, as if in a state half in and half out of this world. He may be a Shaman whose bulging cheeks suggest he is eating coca or hallucinogenic mushrooms. The painting is like fine filigree accomplished with remarkable delicacy. The design on the chest is similar to a necklace or badge of rank, which some Shamans would have been entitled to wear. The entire vessel is very abstract in its complex patterns interwoven around a space almost empty except for three bold stripes of red on the sides. A Shaman may have used this vessel for ritualistic purposes in brewing potions, which would then be pored from the spout. Even after a thousand years this vessel has not lost any of its power, energy, and mystery kept alive by artistic skill, and perhaps a dose of Shamanic magic.