Nazca Ceramic Painters
-100–600Nazca (Peru) · Pre-Columbian Art 200 BCE–1500 CE
The same culture that made the enormous ground drawings on the desert plain also produced polychrome ceramics with the widest colour range in the pre-Columbian Americas — up to fifteen distinct slip colours fired on a single vessel.
Nazca Ceramic Painters's color palette
The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each. Each swatch is an interpretation of the materials behind it, not a sample taken from a single work. How the palettes are made
Slip red
Iron-rich clay slip fired in oxidizing atmosphere. The reds of Nazca ceramics range from orange to deep crimson depending on firing conditions.
Material: Iron-rich clay slip, oxidizing fire
RGB(168, 48, 32)
Slip cream
Kaolin-rich white clay slip — the lightest tone in Nazca pottery. Used for backgrounds and to outline figures.
Material: Kaolin-rich white clay slip
RGB(224, 208, 176)
Slip black
Manganese dioxide slip — creates a deep black when fired. Used for outlines and the bold graphic patterns that define Nazca style.
Material: Manganese dioxide clay slip, reduction fired
RGB(26, 24, 16)
Slip orange
Iron oxide slip at moderate concentration — between the red and cream tones. Used for skin, desert, and transitional areas.
Material: Moderate iron oxide clay slip
RGB(200, 112, 40)
Slip grey
Reduced iron slip — the same material as the red but fired in reducing (oxygen-poor) atmosphere, turning it grey.
Material: Iron clay slip, reducing fire
RGB(122, 120, 112)
Slip violet
Manganese + iron mixed slip — one of the rarest Nazca colors, a true violet achievable only with precise firing control.
Material: Manganese + iron mixed clay slip, controlled firing
RGB(90, 48, 72)
Formation
The Nazca culture occupied the southern coast of Peru from roughly 100 BCE to 800 CE, in one of the driest environments on earth, which is why so much organic material survives. Their ceramics were made by specialists without the potter's wheel, built by hand and coil, and were used both domestically and as grave offerings — the desert burial conditions have preserved colours at close to their original intensity, which is exceptionally rare.
Technique
Slip painting before firing, which is technically demanding because the colours change in the kiln and the painter must work in one set of hues while predicting another. Nazca potters prepared mineral slips — clays coloured with iron, manganese and other oxides — applied them to the leather-hard unfired vessel, burnished the surface with a stone, and fired in an oxidising atmosphere at relatively low temperature. Designs were outlined in black and filled with flat colour, and the imagery wraps continuously around the form with no single viewing position.
The palette
Extraordinary for the technology. White, cream, several distinct yellows, oranges, reds, browns, grey, violet and black, all achieved from mineral slips without glaze — most contemporary ceramic traditions worldwide managed three or four. The colour is used to separate zones of a design rather than to describe appearance, and the iconography of hummingbirds, killer whales, plants and composite supernatural beings is rendered in arbitrary, saturated hues.
Legacy
The ceramics are the primary evidence for Nazca iconography and belief, since the culture left no writing, and the same motifs recur in the geoglyphs on the plain. The technical achievement — a fifteen-colour palette from slips alone — is still cited in ceramic literature as a benchmark for what is possible without glaze technology.
By Pigmentoria · Published · Palette: interpretive reconstruction
Also in this era
Working at the same time
Elsewhere in the atlas, in other movements and other media, these were the hands at work during the same years.