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.
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.
Palette
The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each.