Mochica funerary mask
about 350 to 600
A metal face with wide staring eyes, a broad nose and a mouth set in a straight line looks out from the case, its surface a mottled green and gold. It was made to lie over the face of a dead lord, and it belongs to the Moche, or Mochica, culture that flourished on the north coast of Peru in the first centuries of our era, long before the Incas. The Moche built huge adobe pyramids, irrigated the desert and buried their rulers with masks, headdresses, ear ornaments and nose pieces of gold, silver and gilded copper, the regalia they had worn in life.
Moche metalworkers were among the most inventive of the ancient world. Look at the eyes, which were inlaid with shell and dark stone to bring the face to life, and at the surface, which was originally a bright even gold. The smiths hammered copper sheets to shape and then gilded them by a chemical process called depletion gilding, dissolving copper out of a gold and copper alloy so that a thin skin of pure gold remained. The green you see is the corrosion of the copper beneath, a sign of the centuries the mask spent in a tomb in the dry coastal sand. The features are formal and impassive, the face of a person who has become an ancestor.
The mask reached the museum from the older French collections of Peruvian antiquities, gathered in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when such pieces left Peru in great numbers. Since then, excavations at sites such as Sipán and Huaca de la Luna have revealed intact royal burials and shown how masks like this were used, laid over the wrapped body of a warrior priest among dozens of other objects. In the Americas section it stands for a civilisation whose art, from painted pottery to gold, was among the finest of the ancient Andes.
Did You Know? The mask was once bright gold all over; the green is copper corrosion showing through a gilded skin only a few microns thick.
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