A mask built on bone.
Mēxihcah · Az · té · catl
Cast by hand · Painted by you
Mēxihcah · Mexico
Thousands of turquoise chips the size of a grain of rice, set in resin, over a real human skull.
The Mexica did not invent mosaic work. They took a Mesoamerican tradition running back through the Mixtec and the Toltec and further, and pushed it harder than anybody before them, with tribute lists that specify turquoise by the load and by the province.
The stone came up from what is now the American southwest, hundreds of miles on foot, through territory the empire did not control. It was worth more than gold, because gold you could melt down and turquoise you had to find.
The finest pieces were made by Mixtec specialists working for Mexica patrons, which is a distinction most gallery labels quietly skip.
Codex Mendoza, folio 65r, c. 1541 · Bodleian Library
The best known example is Tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror. It is built on a real human skull, faced in alternating bands of turquoise and black lignite, with eyes of polished pyrite ringed in white conch shell.
The back of the skull was cut away and lined with deerskin so it could be worn or hung, and the jaw is articulated on leather straps. Whoever made it intended it to move.
These were not portraits of anybody. They were worn by, or laid on, the images of gods, and it is the eyes that unsettle people standing in front of the case, because after five hundred years they are still bright.
Codex Borbonicus, folio 13
Most of it was melted, buried or smashed. A handful of mosaic pieces travelled to Europe in the first shipments to Charles V and are now in London, Rome and Copenhagen, and that handful is close to the entire surviving record.
What we know about how they were used comes mostly from the codices, the Mendoza and the Borbonicus among them, painted by Mexica scribes in the decades after the conquest for European readers who wanted to understand what they had just destroyed.
Around ten complete turquoise mosaics survive worldwide. Every one of them sits in a museum outside Mexico.
They were not portraits of anybody. They were worn by the images of gods.
Ours is plaster, and every tessera is a raised facet in the relief rather than a chip of stone. That is exactly the point: the grid is there, and the colour is not.
Blue-green over bone white, black where the lignite runs, and a hard glint where the eyes should be.
Mask Nº 07 · Mexico · 2027
Aztec
A mask built on bone.
Premium plaster, one at a time, in the house on the Siem Reap River.
No colour. The sculpt is the guide: raised edges catch the brush and hold it where it belongs.
Blue-green over bone white, black where the lignite runs, and a hard glint where the eyes should be.
Mask per box
Pots of colour
One mask, five pots of colour, one real brush, a story card. Nestled in a foam tray inside a coloured box. Every mask in the collection ships the same way.
Cast by hand in premium plaster at the house in Siem Reap. Every carved line of the original is there in relief before a brush touches it.
Water-based colour, non-toxic, off a table with a damp cloth. The five change per mask to match the tradition it comes from.
Real fibre, real spring. The kind you keep in the pencil pot long after the mask is finished and on a shelf.
What the mask is in its own tradition, before we cast a copy in plaster and sent it out white.
Yes. Water-based, non-toxic, and it comes off skin and off a table with a damp cloth. Built for a kitchen table on a Sunday.
A story card with the history and the traditional colours, so you know what you are looking at. No paint-by-numbers. The mask ships white on purpose.
Resin is cheaper to ship and it feels like a phone case. Plaster takes paint properly, keeps a sharp edge on every carved line, and has the weight that puts a thing on a shelf instead of in a drawer.
Aztec arrives in 2027. We will not put a month against it until the moulds are cut and the first run is right.
Yes, and we would like that. Minimum order is one case of four, prepaid, and you can collect from the office in Siem Reap if that suits you better than freight. Full pricing and terms sit behind a trade login. Write to us with the name of the shop and we will send a code the same day.
Aztec lands in 2027. Leave your email and you will know the day it does.