Incense burner with feline head

A ceramic incense burner in the form of a feline, made within the Tiwanaku state that dominated the Lake Titicaca basin between about 200 and 1100 CE, and dated by the Metropolitan Museum to 500-1000 CE. It is not, contrary to an initial brief for this record, an Islamic metalwork object: the Met's own accession record and open access data identify it unambiguously as a Tiwanaku ceramic vessel from Bolivia, part of the Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection given by Nelson A. Rockefeller in 1969 and formally accessioned in 1978-79 when the Museum of Primitive Art's holdings were transferred to the Met.

Vessels of this exact form, feline headed, flaring sided, scalloped at the rim, have been recovered in a fully excavated, radiocarbon dated ritual context at the Island of the Sun, deposited alongside sacrificed llamas and imported gold, shell and stone offerings, which is the best evidence available for what this type of object was made to do. This individual vessel's own findspot, export and pre-1969 ownership are not documented in any source consulted for this record, and that gap is recorded as a gap rather than filled with a guess.

What it is

A modeled and painted ceramic vessel, 25.7 by 21 by 30.5 centimetres, in the form of a large feline. The body flares outward from an annular base in what specialists call a hyperboloid profile, a shape distinctive to Tiwanaku ceremonial ware. A modeled feline head projects from one side, ringed by a wide flange carrying painted decoration, and a stumpy, erect tail balances it on the other. On well preserved examples of the type the rim is worked into six scalloped lobes; the surface is painted in bold black outline with flat fields of color, and the feline's eye is rendered divided in half, one side left white and the other filled black, a stylization repeated across Tiwanaku ceramic imagery generally.

The vessel served as an incense burner. It is not an altarpiece or a portrait; it is a piece of ceremonial equipment, built to hold and release smoke, and its form follows that function as much as any iconographic program.

The imagery

Painted profile felines, rendered with wings, appear on the sides of the vessel in addition to the modeled head. The style is consistent with the wider Tiwanaku ceramic tradition, which scholarship describes as echoing the aesthetic of the polity's stone sculpture, most visibly the carved reliefs of the Gateway of the Sun at the capital site.

A specific comparison has been drawn, object to corpus: the painted feline head on this type of vessel is rounder and more simplified than feline heads carved in stone elsewhere at Tiwanaku, which show more naturalistic, expressive eyes and an open mouth with prominent fangs. That is a documented stylistic distinction between media, not a difference in subject; the ceramic and the stone were both depicting the same animal for the same religious culture, in different registers of finish appropriate to their different uses.

What this type of vessel was for

No excavation record survives for this particular piece, so its own findspot and the circumstances of its first use are not known. The type it belongs to, however, is unusually well documented elsewhere. Underwater excavation at the Khoa Reef, off the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca, recovered approximately thirty seven feline modeled incense burners of the same hyperboloid, scalloped rim form, the largest known concentration of the type, deposited together with the sacrificed remains of at least seven juvenile llamas, gold ornaments including medallions bearing a rayed face motif, Spondylus shell figurines imported roughly two thousand kilometers from coastal Ecuador, and worked turquoise and other lapidary material. Radiocarbon dating of the assemblage places its deposition between about 794 and 964 CE, within the Tiwanaku IV and V expansion phases.

That assemblage is offered here as evidence of what vessels of this exact type were for, not as a claim about this particular vessel's own history: incense burners of this form were used, cyclically and repeatedly, in state ritual involving animal sacrifice and the deliberate destruction of valuable imported goods, apparently to reinforce the religious authority of the Tiwanaku state and to bind together communities across a wide region around the lake.

The religious world it belonged to

The gold medallions recovered with the Khoa Reef incense burners carry a rayed face motif that has been read by the excavating archaeologists as depicting a central Tiwanaku religious figure, and the same broad iconographic family, a frontal staff bearing deity with a rayed or radiate head, is carved at large scale on the Gateway of the Sun at the Tiwanaku capital, a figure encyclopaedic literature on the culture calls the Staff God or Doorway God. Whether the specific rayed face on the Khoa medallions and the Gateway's monumental staff god are the same figure, a related figure, or simply share a regional visual vocabulary is not something this record's sources resolve, and it should be treated as an open question rather than an established identity.

What is better supported is the general pattern: portable objects such as this incense burner operated inside a state religious system in which feline imagery, llama sacrifice, and imported prestige goods were burned, broken or deposited together as offerings, and in which the resulting rituals are argued to have served a political as well as a devotional function, knitting together the Tiwanaku core and its surrounding communities under a shared cult. The absence, in this record, of anything more specific about this individual vessel's own ritual biography is a finding in itself: most Tiwanaku ceramic incense burners that survive in museum collections, this one included, were separated from their original ritual context before they were collected, and that context can now only be reconstructed from vessels of the same type recovered archaeologically elsewhere.

Its closest published relative

The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian holds a comparable Tiwanaku feline incense burner, dated to about 600 to 900 CE, decorated with feline and condor motifs and measuring 26 by 34.5 by 21.7 centimetres. That vessel had been assembled at some point before entering the museum's collection with its sherds misaligned, a repair that distorted its original form. In 2015, in the course of preparing the Inka Road exhibition, curator Ann McMullen and conservator Emily Kaplan had the old, incorrect reconstruction taken apart and rebuilt so that the vessel's original proportions and painted decoration could be read correctly.

That object is the nearest documented parallel to the piece described in this record: the same vessel type, the same feline and animal iconographic repertoire, the same culture, but a different accession, a different museum, and its own separate collecting and conservation history. The two should not be confused with one another.

The Tiwanaku state and its ceramic tradition

Tiwanaku was the capital of a polity that dominated the Lake Titicaca basin from roughly 200 to 1000 or 1100 CE, at an altitude of about 3,850 metres, among the highest cities in the ancient world, with a resident population estimated at thirty to seventy thousand at its height. Its principal monuments, the Akapana platform mound and the Kalasasaya enclosure with its monolithic Gateway of the Sun, express a state religious program in cut stone; the ceramic tradition that produced objects such as this incense burner operated inside the same visual and religious system at a smaller, portable scale, made for use rather than as monumental display.

The polity's decline is dated by lake sediment cores and archaeological survey to a prolonged drought affecting the Titicaca basin between roughly 950 and 1100 CE, which is argued to have undermined the raised field agricultural system the state depended on and, with it, the political authority a state built partly on claims of religious and agricultural success. Major construction at the capital halted around 1000 CE and the site was abandoned by about 1100 CE. This general account of Tiwanaku's rise, religion and decline is drawn from a tertiary encyclopaedia source and is flagged here for replacement with the peer reviewed archaeological literature (Janusek, Kolata and others) that this record was not able to consult directly.

How it reached New York

The vessel's own documented history begins only with its ownership by Nelson A. Rockefeller. The Met's credit line reads: The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1969. No dealer, prior owner, purchase date or purchase price for Rockefeller's own acquisition is given in the object record consulted for this entry.

Rockefeller founded the Museum of Primitive Art in New York in 1957 to display his personal collection of art from Africa, Oceania and the ancient Americas. In May 1969 he signed an agreement transferring that museum's collection, staff and library to the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Primitive Art itself closed in 1974, and the physical transfer of its holdings to the Met took place across 1978 and 1979. That is why this object, gifted in 1969, carries an accession number beginning 1978.412: the prefix records the year the collection was formally accessioned into the Met's own registration system, not the year of the gift agreement. Whether this specific vessel passed through the Museum of Primitive Art's own inventory before 1969, or reached Rockefeller by some other route, is not stated in the sources consulted and is recorded here as unknown rather than assumed. The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, named for Nelson Rockefeller's son, who died on a 1961 expedition in New Guinea, opened to the public in 1982.

Where it stands now

The vessel is on view in Gallery 362 of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing. The Met releases its own photography of the object, including the primary image and two further views, as public domain, and that status was re-checked against the Met's own open access catalogue at the time this record was written.

Read plainly, the object's history has two very different registers. One is rich: the type it belongs to has been excavated in a datable, undisturbed ritual context, associated with sacrificed animals and imported prestige goods, and tied to the religious apparatus of a documented Andean state. The other is almost silent: this individual vessel's own findspot, excavation, export and pre 1969 ownership are not recorded anywhere this research found. Both registers belong in the same record, and neither should be allowed to stand in for the other.