Gold and the Incas: National Gallery exhibition explores a golden age

A SPARKLING treasure trove of ancient Peruvian artefacts will draw crowds to the NGA this summer.

A sacrificial knife.

LIKE the ancient Egyptians, ancient Peruvians practised a cult of death. Pre-Hispanic peoples from this nation of precipitous, mist-wreathed mountains and humid, pulsing jungles often buried their dead - especially the rich and powerful - in tombs kitted out with supplies for a comfortable afterlife. Aristocratic Peruvians were often mummified and interred with provisions ranging from corn liquor in ceramic vessels to ceremonial swords, nose ornaments and textiles that were once more highly prized than gold.

There is a sublime irony in the ancient Peruvians' preoccupation with the rituals of death: it would ultimately keep alive their endangered culture. For in burying their art treasures alongside the deceased, Peruvians protected them from the insults of time, environmental degradation and the Spanish conquistadors, who in the 1500s went on a looting and killing spree of shattering dimensions. As National Gallery of Australia director Ron Radford puts it: "Comparatively little remains of ancient Peruvian art, particularly gold and silver, which were plundered by the Spanish conquistadors ... But in the last 100 years there have been extraordinary archeological finds."

Indeed, across the past century, Peru has recovered a national trove of ancient art treasures through archeological excavations of tombs and graves. Some of these digs have yielded spectacular results.

In the 1920s, Julio Tello, known as the father of Peruvian archeology, famously discovered 429 "mummy bundles" in a necropolis, or ancient cemetery, on the country's Paracas Peninsula. Some recovered grave goods, including 2000-year-old woven textiles or mantles from Paracas, are ranked among the ancient world's finest art pieces.

Now, for the first time, such masterworks are being exhibited in Australia in the NGA's summer blockbuster, Gold and the Incas: Lost Worlds of Peru, which opens on Friday.

Lost Worlds is the first survey of ancient Peruvian art staged in this country, according to the Canberra gallery. It comprises more than 200 artefacts, including a 3000-year-old sculpture of a winged deity carrying a severed head, an exquisite gold and turquoise button in the form of an owl's head, and the vividly embroidered textiles used to wrap mummies.

Exhibition curator Christine Dixon, who drew on the expertise of her Peruvian counterparts to devise the show, says it includes "some of the greatest works of art ever produced in ancient Peru". According to Dixon, it also "challenges the monolithic view that ancient Peru was just the Incas". The exhibits date back thousands of years to pre-Incan times. "The sheer variety and beauty of the works," Dixon says, "will open people's eyes to a whole new set of cultures."

Peru's Culture Minister Diana Alvarez - Calderon Gallo, who is to open the exhibition, reiterates: "This exhibition will introduce Australians to one of the great civilisations of the world."

The exhibition marks 50 years of diplomatic ties between Lima and Canberra, and is one of the key events in the ACT's 2013 centenary celebrations. In the Lost Worlds catalogue, Gallo notes the similarities between Australia's indigenous and Peru's pre-European cultures. She says they both evolved "in isolation from the cultural pathways that characterise the Old World" and that this "created the opportunity for different developmental paths that make our ancient cultures so unique".

Spanning more than 2500 years, the exhibition showcases the heritage of the Inca empire and its lesser known predecessors, among them the Chimu, Huari, Chavin, Moche and Nazca civilisations. Drawn from 10 Peruvian museums including Lima's National Museum of Archeology, Anthropology and History, the exhibits have an extraordinarily high heritage value, given so many Peruvian antiquities were lost to the conquistadors.

The jewellery, body ornaments, sculptures, pottery and textiles made in pre-Hispanic Peru are widely admired for their aesthetic depth, astonishing attention to detail and technological accomplishment. Included in the Canberra exhibition is a pectoral or decorative breast plate thought to be up to 3000 years old. Made of conch shell, it is inlaid with 740 blue stones and bordered with carved jaguar heads.

With its smooth, bulbous pendant, a quartz necklace from the Moche culture could pass for a piece of jewellery from a contemporary catalogue, yet it is between 1900 and 1200 years old. Also on display will be four woven and elaborately embroidered Paracas mantles (or cloaks), which Dixon says would have demanded hundreds or thousands of hours of labour. She reveals such textiles were so admired in pre-European times they cost more than gold.

Asked about the oldest artefact - the sculpture depicting the god grasping a severed head - the curator exclaims: "Trophy head! You lost the war, you lost your head!" Raids and battles were common in ancient Peru, "not everywhere, but if you lost the war, you really lost".

The ancients didn't spend all their time fighting; they partied too. The exhibition's elegant pottery vessels probably held "chicha" or corn beer, which was often offered to the gods and buried with the dead. "If you were buried with a vessel, you had something to drink on your next journey into the afterlife. Exactly the same as in ancient Egypt," muses Dixon, who is the NGA's senior curator of international painting and sculpture.

In Gallo's words, the exhibition tells "the stories of a land ... where our ancestors developed great civilisations to adapt and to thrive in the face of constant challenge and adversity". Here, some historical context is useful. For more than 2000 years before the arrival of the Spanish in Peru, many distinctive local cultures including the Chim and Huari - the southern hemisphere's first empires - rose, flourished and fell. These civilisations produced exceptionally gifted artists and artisans, but by the 1400s the Inca culture was by far the most dominant.

Known for its monumental architecture (including the Machu Picchu citadel) and belief in human sacrifice, the Inca empire, Gallo says, was "the largest political entity in the New World". However, this civilisation was in turn conquered by the Spanish (who had superior weaponry) in the 16th century.

The conquistadors razed the Inca capital, Cuzco, and looted shiploads of gold and silver artefacts, which they sent back to Spain and melted down to make coins. Dixon, who has worked on this exhibition for 2 1/2 years, estimates that up to 90 per cent of Peru's indigenous population was killed or died of introduced disease at this time.

"Despite the looting and destruction," she observes in a paper written for the exhibition, "an amazing amount of the brilliant art of the previous two millennia has been discovered and excavated in the last century. Many of these masterworks [will be] on display in Canberra." She says archeologists continue to make startling discoveries.

Last month, two intact mummies - an adult and a child - were found in an excavation site in suburban Lima. In June, the Peruvian government announced the discovery of a 1200-year-old royal tomb in northern Peru. This undisturbed mausoleum was deep underground and included dozens of art treasures and the remains of three queens and 60 others - some of them possibly human sacrifices.

Nevertheless, Gallo cautions that Peru's heritage is under threat from economic growth, overdevelopment and looting. As well as highlighting the importance of preserving cultural heritage, she hopes exhibitions such as Lost Worlds also will increase awareness of the need to fight the illicit traffic in antiquities. The International Council of Museums warns that despite laws protecting its heritage, "the cultural wealth of Peru is affected by looting and illicit trade". On its website, the council reveals that from 2004 to 2006, illegal exports of more than 5000 cultural and natural objects from Peru were intercepted. Even so, it continues, clandestine excavations at archeological sites and thefts from museums are on the increase.

Australia has become "a strategic partner" in this battle against looting, according to Gallo. An NGA spokesman says the provenance of the gallery's own small collection of Peruvian artefacts, to be included in Lost Worlds, was checked by a Peruvian expert in 2002. At the same time as the NGA co-operates in containing illicit art trade, however, it has acquired antiquities - some potentially problematic - from US-based dealer Subhash Kapoor, who will soon stand trial in India for allegedly overseeing a multi-million-dollar empire of looted Asian art.

Perhaps less well-known is that an ancient textile with a distinctive chequerboard design the NGA acquired in New York in the 1970s turned out to have been stolen from Peru's National Museum. Radford explains in the catalogue that after the theft was confirmed, Australia voluntarily returned the mantle, in 1989, "without legal proceedings, as a gesture of bilateral goodwill between our two countries". Now, he adds, "the National Museum (of Peru) has very generously lent us four of their rare and fragile Paracas mantles for this exhibition".

One of those mantles, the Paracas Mantle with Flying Figures, was discovered by Tello, South America's first indigenous archeologist. It is thought to have come originally from a cemetery on the Paracas Peninsula, where Tello discovered the 400-plus "mummy bundles". The mummies had been placed in baskets in a seated position, wrapped and covered with up to 40 layers of textiles, or mantles. The flying figures work depicts long-haired mythical figures on an almost glowing red background. Its colours, preserved for 2000 years by the arid conditions in which the mantle was entombed, are "like new", Dixon says.

The Paracas textiles, she explains, were generally made from "the finest alpaca and llama spun fibres, and were woven on looms". Figures or motifs were embroidered on to the woven cloth "using fine alpaca thread". Their jewel-like colours were produced with dyes derived from plants and animals; black and purple dyes came from molluscs, blue was sourced from the indigo plant and red from plants or cochineal (derived from insects).

The fabrics were not just used as funerary items. Often embroidered with motifs of fierce, supernatural creatures, they imparted knowledge about religious beliefs and also were worn to convey social status. (Capes, cloaks, skirts and turbans have been found in mummy tombs in the region.) Some of the most ambitious textiles were more than 30m long and featured complex weaving techniques. According to Dixon, the skill and sophistication of their makers "is unparalleled".

The exhibition also includes quirky and risque objects, including portrait pots - jugs that are three-dimensional portraits of their owners - and erotic, sculpted vessels. One depicts a couple who appear to be copulating, another is in the shape of two penises. There is a plethora of gold crowns, including, oddly, a square crown, as well as gold vessels and animal sculptures - the natural world held a special spiritual significance for these ancient civilisations. Also featured are nose, ear and forehead jewellery that decorated the bodies of the dead, while body ornaments made with green and orange macaw feathers retain an almost neon brilliance.

Why has it taken so long to mount a Peruvian survey in Australia? Dixon cites cost as one reason - with their elevated heritage value (not to mention all that gold), the artefacts are expensive to insure. (The federal government is underwriting this show through its International Exhibitions Insurance Program.) Nevertheless, the Peruvian museums that lent works were, she says, "very generous" and eager to support a freshly conceived exhibition. "This show is unique," she says with an ardour that stays on the right side of gushy. "The world of ancient Peru is very far away from us in time and space, but I think these works of art are very engaging, and will spark the enthusiasm of the audience. It's breathtaking stuff."

Gold and the Incas, Lost Worlds of Peru, December 6 to April 21, 2014, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.