Aríbalo

This small vessel in the shape of an “aríbalo” (storage jars), decorated and painted with geometric motifs is typical of the Cusco-Inca or Imperial Inca style, a tradition that had its origin in the Cusco region during the apogee of the Incas (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries AD). Contrasting with earlier coastal traditions like the Mochica or Nasca, who depicted more figurative images, the soberness and abstraction of the Inca iconography is surprising and somewhat disappointing. For the Incas, it seems, images did not have a major role as a means for imperial political propaganda, rather, it would have been endowed with a complex symbolism in which decoding would have been restricted to a minority. (CP)