“Portraiture was not common in the Americas prior to the sixteenth century, but there are periods and places where the genre was explored in creative and intriguing ways. Well before the rise of the Inca state in the fifteenth century, potters on Peru’s north coast produced great numbers of ceramic bottles in the shapes of humans, animals, plants, and imaginative combinations of these in the ceramic workshops associated with ritual centers between the Nepeña River in the south and the Piura Valley in the north. Many of these are notable for their descriptive accuracy, though we would not designate them as portraits. For a few centuries in the middle of the first millennium A.D., however, artists of the Moche cultures excelled at the creation of “portrait vessels”, so-called for their striking apparent resemblance to specific individuals.” [source]
The Moche, in addition to the realism that you see in the pottery vessels, also worked with many other themes including erotic subject matter, as hinted at in the last slide. The ability to cover such a wide swath of styles and subject matter, from realistic to abstract portraiture, from the everyday to the erotic, makes me curious to learn more about what must have been a very dynamic and sophisticated civilization.