The Tlatilco Acrobat
About 1200 to 900 BC
A small clay figure bends over backwards so completely that his feet rest on his head, forming a hollow vessel with a spout at the top. The face is calm, almost smiling, and the hands press on the ground as if the pose were effortless. It is one of the earliest sculptures in the museum, more than three thousand years old, and it comes from Tlatilco, a village site that lay under what is now a northern suburb of Mexico City.
The figure is a bottle: the body is hollow and the neck emerges from the ankles. Look at the sure modelling of the muscles of the back and thighs and the way the potter has turned a difficult acrobatic posture into a stable, balanced form. Contortionists appear in later Mesoamerican art as ritual performers, and in Olmec thought the backbend may have symbolised the boundary between worlds. Traces of red paint survive on the surface. The technology is simple, coiled and modelled clay fired at low temperature, but the confidence is not.
Tlatilco was excavated in the nineteen forties and fifties after brickworkers digging clay began finding burials. The site yielded hundreds of graves with figurines of women, dancers, masks and double headed beings, and it showed that the valley of Mexico had a rich village culture long before the great cities. The Acrobat was found in one of these burials, placed beside the dead as an offering. In the same hall you will find a reconstruction of a Tlatilco grave and cases of the famous pretty lady figurines, so you can see the world this small performer came from.
Did You Know? The figure is actually a bottle, and liquid would have been poured out through the spout formed by the acrobat's feet.
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