A Moche Stirrup Bottle with a Seated Man, ca. 200 - 400 CE

This splendid red-brown ceramic stirrup bottle is finely rendered by its artisan creator in the form of a man sitting with knees to chest and arms wrapped around his knees, his head turned slightly to the right, with long straight hair, wide eyes, bushy eyebrows, beaked nose, and large ears, wearing a striped poncho with his feet peeking out beneath, a stirrup spout attached at the back  Well before the rise of the Inca state in the fifteenth century, potters on Peru’s north coast produced great numbers of ceramic bottles in the shapes of humans, animals, plants, and imaginative combinations of these in the ceramic workshops associated with ritual centers between the Nepeña River in the south and the Piura Valley in the north. Many of these are notable for their descriptive accuracy, though we would not designate them as portraits.  However, for a few centuries in the mid-first millennium CE, artists of the Moche cultures excelled at the creation of “portrait vessels,” so-called for th