Page 581 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

422 423
Armory Kept on the Occasion of the 1775 Sale
NECKLACE WITH CENTRAL IDOL and Existing in the Royal Gallery (MSS 103). BEADED BELT

Taino The necklace was subsequently described in the c. 1525-1550
shell (Tridalna gigas?) 1820 and 1843 catalogues of the Regio Museo di Taino
3
length 24 ($ /8) Storia Naturale and then in the catalogues of the shell, seeds, cotton, convex mirrors, glass, brass
3
5
museum that is its home today (see Zanin 1991). 83.4 x 6.8 (32 /4 x 2 / 8), height of
Museo di Antropologia e Etnologia, Florence
D.Z. central figure 10.3 (4)
Museum fur Volkerkunde, Vienna
The care with which this necklace was made and
the appearance of the small idol at its center sug-
gest that its use was ceremonial. Comparison The vivid account given by Bartolome de Las
of the idol's features with other Taino amulets Casas has made it common knowledge that the
reveals a common morphology, the face of a bat. conquest of the New World began with the mas-
In Taino mythology bats were possibly associated sive depopulation of the West Indies. Equally
with the spirits of the dead (Garcia Arevalo 1988). affected by the destructive impact of European
This necklace is one of a small number of Taino contact were the products of the art and crafts-
pieces with an early provenance. According to manship of the indigenous Tamos. Since images of
Giglioli (1910), this necklace is originally from zemis, a class of supernatural beings revered by
Santo Domingo and reached Florence and the the Tamos, were an integral part of many if not
Medici family "at the end of the seventeenth most utilitarian artifacts, the destruction of thou-
century or the beginning of the eighteenth cen- sands of these "idols" became a priority for zeal-
tury " Sara Ciruzzi (1983) has noted that it ous Christian missionaries.
was mentioned for the first time in the Inventory Of those artifacts sent to Europe in the first
of the Medici Armory in 1696 (Guardaroba Medi- decades after 1492, only five have survived in
cea. 1091:229) and then in the Armory Inventory European collections. The oval plate (cat. 421) and
of 1715. It appears also in the last inventory of shell necklace (cat. 422), which the present author
the Medici Armory from 1746-1747 (Guardaroba believes is more likely to be a headband, are
Medicea. 60 appendix: 139), passing to the thought to have been preserved in the Medici col-
Inventory of the Lorraine Armory of 1868 (MSS lections in Florence (Giglioli 1910), although only
97:115) and the Inventory of the Pieces in the the latter can actually be traced to the Medici

580 CIRCA 1492