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Tunic with Confronting Catfish

Nasca-Wari weavers, 800–850 CE. Peru.

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Thirty works are on view at a time, ten to a room. Every day at midnight UTC, the ten that have hung longest go back into storage and ten others come out, so each work hangs for three days and then rests for three. A work always returns to the same place on the same wall.

A woven red, gold and black textile with two large stylized catfish facing each other at the center, their spotted bodies broken into stepped shapes, between zigzag borders.
Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0). Select it for the full size.

Two enormous catfish meet nose to nose at the center of this woven panel. You can spot them by their whiskered faces and round eyes. Their spotted bodies stretch out to the sides and are broken up into stepped, angular shapes, so the fish almost turn into a pattern. Above and below run bold zigzags in black, white and gold. The weavers made this from camelid hair, from llamas or alpacas, in a tapestry technique that took enormous time and skill. Andean weavers often designed in this way, turning animals into geometry while still keeping them recognizable. Step back and you see the pattern; step closer and the fish come back.

Look closely

  1. Find each fish’s eyes and whiskers.
  2. Follow the zigzags along the top and bottom. Are they perfectly even?
  3. Step back, then come close. When do you see fish, and when do you see pattern?

While you sit

Two fish meeting in the middle of a river. Sit between them.

Your seat in the galleries: a row of stepped blocks in terracotta and gold, like a woven border.

About the work

Title
Tunic with Confronting Catfish
Artist
Nasca-Wari weavers
Date
800–850 CE
From
Peru
Medium
Camelid hair, tapestry-weave
Size
H. 21 1/2 × W. 43 1/4 in. (54.6 × 109.9 cm)
Rights
Public domain
Image
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0)
Record
The museum's page for this work

The words on this page were written for the campus, not taken from the museum's label.

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