The world that wasn't there

"One of the first people in Europe to consider the gifts which the Aztec ruler Montezuma gave to Hérnan Cortés as works of art was Albrecht Dürer: ‘Nothing I have yet seen has given me such joy as the objects brought to the king from the new gold countries […] Some pieces display an extraordinary skill; I have been astonished by the ingenuity of the inhabitants of those far distant lands’, he wrote. It was 1520 and those works had been sent to Brussels. The five centuries that have passed since the beauty of these objects was first noticed seem not to have been enough for the ancient cultures of Latin America to be fully understood. This catalogue of pre-Columbian art is a fresh attempt to examine and come to terms with artworks produced by a section of mankind that came to the attention of Europeans only after the voyages of Columbus and other explorers. It illustrates the collection of pre-Columbian art of Giancarlo and Inti Ligabue, one of the few collections of its kind in Italian hands: over 150 pieces from Mesoamerica and South America, an extraordinary corpus of objects that give testament to the excellence achieved by ancient artists. But it also tells the story of certain rare objects which belonged to the Medici Collection, one of Europe’s greatest treasures. Among these are two atlatls, spear-throwers covered in gold-leaf from the Aztec or Mixtec cultures, a Taíno necklace dating from the fourteenth or fifteenth century, and a Teotihuacan stone mask. These objects are accompanied by pieces from private European collections and a number of significant artworks from the Quai Branly Museum in Paris."--

"The World That Wasn’t There tells the story of what became known to the West only after the voyages of Columbus and other European explorers: the beautiful and superbly crafted art of North and South America. From the best-known and most ancient civilizations— such as the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec—to the spectacular vestiges of Teotihuacan, Veracruz, and Nayarit, from the ceramic Venuses of Valdivia, Ecuador, to the gold objects of Tairona, the ceramics of the Incas, and the fabrics and pots of the Nazca region, it is all here, in a stunning book presenting one of the most important private collections of pre-Columbian art in the world. This publication of treasures from the Ligabue Collection, assembled by the Italian palaeontologist and archaeological and anthropo­logical scholar Giancarlo Ligabue (1931–2015), provides an unprecedented opportunity for collectors, scholars, and all those interested in pre-Columbian art."--