Word: quimbaya
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Terse Shapes. The word primitive simply evaporates in the presence of a work like the Quimbaya pectoral (see color page) with its strange deity, man-bodied and bird-beaked, whose bifurcated wings of head dress echo the sweep of the gold blade beneath his feet. The sharpness of execution - perfect corrugated threads lying in their parallel curves, the sense of exacting formal detail at every part of the design - is formidable. Indeed, the goldworking cultures that flourished in the isolated river valleys of western Colombia from the end of the 1st millennium B.C. - Quimbaya and Tairona, Tolima and Muisca, Narino...
...more advanced were the later Quimbaya Indians of Colombia, who discovered how to make alloys of gold and copper and also mastered the sophisticated "lost-wax" technique of casting. First, the Indians made a model of the sculpture in beeswax or resin and covered it with a powdered charcoal and then a thick layer of clay. Next, they applied heat, melting the wax so that it ran out a channel in the hardened clay impression. They then used the impression as a breakable mold, pouring the molten gold in through the channel in the clay. It is the same method...
...hieroglyphics similar to the Mayan, but like the Mayan it has never been deciphered. Having no records to go by, archeologists are necessarily vague in categorizing Andean art, but laymen may find a certain poetic fascination in the mere names of the main civilizations: Chavin, Cupisnique, Salinar, Cavernas, Quimbaya, Chanapata, Chiripa, Mochica, Tiahuanaco, Chimu, Chibcha, Inca...