Painted Drum

AD 500–1000

Painted Drum, AD 500–1000. Central Andes, Middle Horizon, North Coast?. Animal hide, gesso, wooden slats, pigment; overall: 27 x 28 x 12 cm (10 5/8 x 11 x 4 3/4 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund 2022.37 In the 1600s, music was so important to Indigenous Andean ceremonial life that Spaniards destroyed thousands of musical instruments to hasten Natives’ conversion to Christianity. The number of surviving, older instruments suggests that music had similar import in earlier periods. This rare example is painted with a figure wearing a crescent headdress, an emblem of status; it may have been played by a woman. This painted drum may have been played by a woman in antiquity.