Some of the most visually striking textiles in ancient Peru were created more than 1,500 years ago by the Nasca people, the same people who created one of the twentieth century's most fascinating enigmas-the Nasca lines. Massive linear patterns etched onto the barren plain (and still visible today) reflect the ritual imagery so skillfully conceived by Nasca weavers. The lines had religious and practical functions, but textiles formed the substance of the social fabric: More important than gold, cloth was the capital of all tribute, taxation, and religious ceremony.
The desperate demand for survival on the arid desert coast of Peru was reflected in the art of the ancient Nasca culture. Appeasing the gods of nature was imperative in its pantheistic and polytheistic universe. Ceramic and textile artists portrayed kaleidoscopic supernatural creatures in human, animal and composite form with myriad limbs and tails-snaking out, intersecting and permeating background space, acting as visual metaphors for society's belief in the interconnection of every layer and aspect of nature.
Early textiles from about A.D. 100 to 400 depicted supernaturals as boisterously unbridled in color and form, yet visually cohesive. As the culture progressed from 500 to 700, however, textiles demonstrated a strong trend toward abstraction, fragmentation and abbreviation, featuring a single part of an image as a surrogate for the whole. The tunic proposed for Collectors Committee acquisition manifests this tendency with explosively dynamic lines and patterns, a proliferation of surrogate symbols and complex chromatic relationships.
The tunic's most significant pattern, a three-pronged trident or pitchfork-like form, might be an emblem for Nasca underground water canals, but is more likely an abstraction of the clawed paw of the feline-an enduring totem in Pre-Columbian iconography. Symbolizing nature's raw predatory force, the feline recurs frequently in the Peruvian textile vocabulary. The "paw" tracks back and forth in a dynamic gold zigzag, traversing fields of iconic designs traditional to all Nasca textiles. But behind the bright colors, creating a stable support for the chaotic brilliance of gold, pink and white, is a matrix of interlocking "paws" woven in a remarkably subtle combination of rich and somber hues. The repetition of this religious symbol in multiple chromatic layers connects the wearer of this monumental garment to his universe.
