Precious Stone and Other Sculpted Materials
It is remarkable that the Maya, who had no metal tools, created many objects from a very thick and dense material, jade (jadeite), particularly all sorts of (royal) dress elements such as belt ornaments, celts, ear spools, pendants, and also masks. Celts (i.e., flat, celt-shaped ornaments) were often engraved with a stela-like representation of the king. The best-known example of a mask is probably the death mask of K'inich Janaab' Pakal, ruler of Palenque; it had a "skin" made from jade and "eyes" made from mother-of-pearl and obsidian. Many stone carvings had jade inlays, and certain cylindrical vases had an outer layer of square jade discs.
Among other sculpted and engraved materials are flint, shell, and bone, often found in caches and burials. The so-called 'eccentric flints' are ceremonial objects of uncertain use, in their most elaborate forms of elongated shape with usually various heads extending on one or both sides, sometimes those of the lightning deity, more often resembling the head of the Maya maize god. Shell was often worked into small disks showing human, possibly ancestral heads and deities, and into other decorative elements. Human and animal bones were decorated with incised symbols and scenes. A collection of small and modified, tubular bones from an 8th-century royal burial under Tikal Temple I contains some of the most subtle engravings known from the Maya, including several scenes with the Tonsured maize god in a canoe.
Read more about this topic: Maya Art
Famous quotes containing the words precious stone, precious, stone, sculpted and/or materials:
“I do not see why, since America and her autumn woods have been discovered, our leaves should not compete with the precious stones in giving names to colors; and, indeed, I believe that in course of time the names of some of our trees and shrubs, as well as flowers, will get into our popular chromatic nomenclature.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There’s precious little to say between day and dark,
Perhaps a few words on the implacable will
Of time sailing like a magic barque
Or something as fine for the amenities....”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“Dylan used to sound like a lung cancer victim singing Woody Guthrie. Now he sounds like a Rolling Stone singing Immanuel Kant.”
—Also quoted in Robert Shelton, No Direction Home, ch. 2, “Prophet Without Honor” (1986)
“Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.”
—Frank Zappa (1940–1994)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)