FEATURE 96 generally is more forthcoming with environmental information instead, as in fig. 24, where the presence of camelids reflects involvement of the depicted personages in agricultural activity. However, even such iconographic themes are often so complex that they defy our interpretation. The detail in fig. 21 is such an example. The main motif of the composition is a personage of evident importance, imposingly accoutered in what textile curator Ann Rowe has so eloquently called a “crescent headdress” and with a quasi-realist human visage. Dramatic elements have been introduced into the composition: The body is angular, curvilinear trophy heads flank the primary geometric visage, while surrounding avian and aquatic creatures rush through the composition. How to reconcile such disparate motifs remains unclear. The visages that we have just discussed, despite inevitable incognita, represent what we can understand as a reasonably rational notion of the human visage. We move now into another sphere of graphic thought, epitomized by the Paracas personage (fig. 22), which can equally be read in two alternating modes, the upright and the inverted. Alternating renditions of such motifs, repeated in serial imagery on large embroidered mantles, are omnipresent in Paracas textile art. This figure (or figures) introduces us to what was perhaps the world’s first “surrealism.” In addition to the shamanic/deistic interpretations discussed above, artistically in the upright mode the figure seems static, whereas when viewed upside down, a dramatic change occurs: It is now hurtling downward through space. This composition reveals a bewildering, complex, and hallucinatory world defined by the presence of an ensemble of serpents, felines, birds, and other creatures, either protruding from the body or closely associated with it. From the broad mouth below the staring eyes formed by the heads of fauna, two serpents emerge in curvilinear equilibrium to remind us that such creatures were omnipresent and integral entities in the cosmic world of ancient Peru. The artist has not forgotten the stark realities of ritual life—a trophy head is held in the right hand of the personage in the upright posture, and a jagged knife in the form of a fish is in the left hand. Human metamorphoses and identifications with the zoomorphic world were and still are deeply engrained facets of Andean life. The Spanish chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616) vividly describes how dancers dressed as pumas and foxes enlivened local celebrations. Today, in the famed annual Diablada festival and procession in Oruro, Bolivia, human personages with zoomorphic accoutrements play a predominant role. But even the sixteenth-century Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who created dazzling Baroque oil paintings of human forms remarkable for their facial features composed of multiple vegetal and animal elements (fig. 23), seems of mild impact compared with such marvels of early Paracas textile work. Nearly two millennia before Arcimboldo’s pioneering paintings, Paracas weavers transformed a simple visage into a hallucinatory image combining a keen awareness of the local environment and the incomparable cosmic imagination of the ancient Peruvians. Such works take us into a magical/mystical graphic world of aesthetics that has no parallel in any other of the world’s civilizations. Another major type of artistic interpretation is a considerably more stylized rendition of the human-type face, where linear/geometric adaptations are dominant. A fine example of this is to be found in a Nazca feather textile (fig. 24) in which the heads of the two figures are rendered as extraordinary concentric ovaloids, so astonishingly “modern” that they immediately bring to mind the “personage” motif of Joan Miró, particularly as rendered in its sculptural form (fig. 25). This textile is even more interesting in that it moves beyond mere stylization by including elements of representation. The ovaloid-headed figures are presumably campesinos (workers in the fields), shown with their camelids so indispensable in daily life: the llama because it could transport heavy loads and/or the alpaca valued for its high-quality wool. A magnificent Chancay mantle (fig. 26) with a richly woven border in the lower area carries linear abstraction further. The main area of the mantle contains stepped diamond and cross formats composed of colored, slightly extended squares, within each of which is a highly stylized face consisting of two conjoined vertical diamond shapes framing an ascetic pair of eyes. The richly colored border contains rising hook motifs composed of interlocking minimalist heads formed simply of triangles and crosses, each mirrored below. Whether the artist’s reduction of the faces to such technical linear forms was a subjective expression or a design postulated by Chancay state authorities, the result is a symmetrical tour de force. Perhaps even more stylized is the dramatic use of geometric shapes to create visages so avant-garde that they seem to come straight out of the twentieth century. This can be exemplified by consistent motifs from the relatively little-known south coast Siguas culture of the Arequipa area of southern Peru, c. 500 BC–AD 100. These large panels have a central focal point that is a highly stylized “minimalist” rendition of a visage containing two eyes with the nose inferred simply by a central vertical line (fig. 27). FIG. 20: Trophy head. Nazca/Huari, South Coast, Peru. AD 700–1000. Cotton, feathers, human bone and hair. H: 35 cm. Ex Georges Halphen Collection, Paris. Private collection. Photo: Michel Gurkinkel. FACING PAGE LEFT, top to bottom: FIG. 21: Detail of a painted mantle. Coastal Huari, South Coast, Peru. AD 800–1000. Cotton. 160 x 111.8 cm. Private collection, Lima. Photo: A. Geiser. FIG. 22: Detail of the face of Fig. 1. FIG. 23: Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1599), Autumn, 1573. Oil on canvas. 76 x 64 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
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