carved and polychromed (overall production method/technique)
Measurements:
average spatial: 17 in x 7 in x 3 in; 43.18 cm x 17.78 cm x 7.62 cm
Object Name:
Finial, Altar Screen
Date made:
1775-1799
Associated dates:
1966 10 27 / 1966 10 27
1881 01 06 / 1881 01 06, 1965 00 00 / 1965 00 00
Description:
This European Baroque-style polychromed ornamental fragment with floral, scroll and tassle motifs carved out of locally grown cedar was originally part of the altar of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Zuni (part of present-day New Mexico). It was part of the renovated decoration installed in the mission church c. 1778-1779, and one of several fragments collected for the U.S. National Museum's Bureau of Ethnology by James Stevenson and Frank Hamilton Cushing without permission from the community they were studying. On November 21, 1879, in a report addressed to J. C. Pilling, Chief Clerk of the Bureau, Stevenson reported: "I secured from the Old Church of Zuni two large images 4 ft. highÂ…and the center piece of the altarÂ…Got them in the dead of night." In the annual report of the Bureau published in 1896, Cushing reported: "A few years since, a party of Americans who accompanied me to Zuni desecrated the beautiful antique shrine of the church, carrying away 'Our Lady of Guadalupe of the Sacred Heart,' the guardian angels, and some of the bas-reliefs attached to the frame of the altar. When this was discovered by the Indians, consternation seized the whole tribe; council after council was held, at which I was alternately berated (because people who had come there with me had thus 'plundered their fathers' house'), and entreated to plead with 'Washintons' to have these 'precious saints and sacred masks of their fathers' returned to them."
