Auch (AFP)
Renamed the Museum of the Americas, the Auch Museum reopened this weekend after years of renovation on its impressive collection of pre-Columbian art, the second in France after the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac thanks to passion from a native of the city.
With some 10,000 pieces, Auch has about 10% of the pre-Columbian works present in France, notes Fabien Ferrer-Joly, the curator.
A treasure, that this small town of Gers owes to one of its natives, Guillaume Pujos, young traveler passionate of art and archeology.
Starting at age 27 for South America, he will "collect", according to the habits of his time, a hundred objects, reported as early as 1896 and again in 1906.
The museum, which he was appointed curator in 1911 and to which he will bequeath his collections will then enrich them through acquisitions and endowments. To receive from the Ministry of Culture the label "National reference center in pre-Columbian art and Latin American sacred art".
If it does not have the power of Quai-Branly, which holds "80% of pre-Columbian art collections" - the rest being scattered in a multitude of other institutions - it offers a trip in "2,500 years of history ", in the heart of civilizations prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus, notes Mr. Ferrer-Joly.
- Cults and sacrifices -
They "grew from northern Chile to northern Mexico, including the Caribbean, from the first millennium BC to the fifteenth century," says the conservative.
The Auscità collection is made up of 90% of objects from the Andes, unfolding a panorama of the Andean civilizations of their formation until the imperial period Inca.
Dotted with ceramics, goldsmiths, statues, fabrics and a unique collection of feather paintings, the museum tour is divided into themes, starting with the organization of the universe in Andean thought, its cosmovision.
Thus appear on ceramics the representation of symbolic animals of the three worlds, "the birds for the world from above, the world of heaven," explains Mr. Ferrer-Joly, the serpents, for the world below, where sit the dead, and felines, for the earthly world ".
In particular, a surprising, almost contemporary, bottleneck with a feline decoration on the belly, of Huari culture (7th century) stands out.
"The use of ceramics in pre-Columbian societies is not limited to a domestic function", details the catalog. It "also has a cult and ceremonial dimension" that visitors discover during the visit, worship of the dead and ancestors, erotic ceramics.
A vase with terracotta handle, representing the head of a captive, tumi, ceremonial sacrificial knives, also illustrate the importance attached to human sacrifices, considered by the Andean societies as necessary to maintain the order of the world.
- "Jewel" of feathers -
Change of atmosphere with the passage to halls dedicated to the pen, a "unifying element of pre-Columbian cultures", "which was more valuable than gold", according to Mr. Ferrer-Joly.
"Only high dignitaries were allowed to wear feathers," he says. The value given to this material will continue beyond the conquest, as evidenced by the "jewel" of the museum, a mosaic of feathers on wood made in 1539 in Mexico, "the Mass of Saint Gregory".
The work, one of the first Christian paintings of the New World and probably one of the latest productions of Aztec art, represents the appearance of Christ before the Pope celebrating Mass, with a wealth of detail, some of the 1 / 10th millimeter: the instruments of passion, the portrait of Judas, the book of mass ...
In addition to this exceptional and luminous piece, there is a triptych of the Virgin and five other feather paintings, making the Auch Museum one of the main collections of Mexican plumassee in Europe.
© 2019 AFP