Coclé Polychrome Plate

Emile Deletaille, Brussels

Andre Blieck, Brussels, acquired from the above in the 1980s

Lin and Emile Deletaille, Brussels, acquired from the above in 2019

Thence by descent

Brussels, Royal Museums of Art and History, Trésors du Nouveau Monde, September 15 - December 27, 1992

Emile and Lin Deletaille, eds., Trésors du Nouveau Monde, Brussels, 1992, p. 281, fig. 256

The lively, stylized figures painted in crisp and sharp colors, are classic features of Panamanian ceramics. These dancing saurian figures probably represent shaman in ceremonial transformation. The symmetrically paired figures have legs and arms tipped with large taloned appendages. The serrated body projecting from each waist arches overhead and terminates in a frontal face and outstretched arms, perhaps a crab.

Recent scholarship has recognized the importance of the art from the Ishmus region of Panama, Costa Rica and northern Colombia. As Grinnel notes “Panamanian ceramics testify to a two-thousand-year evolution in the expression of a limited number of iconographic themes. The ceramics reveal a growth in the cultural sophistication and hierarchical structure of society [.]”¹

Repeated imagery within regional styles relates to beliefs and myths rather than activities or stories. For a similar style of plate see ibid., p. 230, fig. 8.46.

¹ Alan Grinnell, Painting the Cosmos: Art and Iconography of

the Ceramics of Ancient Panama, Albuquerque, 2024, p. X