These are two vases from the Peruvian pre-Columbian culture of the Moche at the Museum of Regards in Covignano-Rimini, Italy. The woman caught in the mirror is a PR friend of mine. The museum of Regards, according to its board of directors,among them the well known French anthropologist Marc Augé, tries to render its visitors more attentive to the reflective dimension of our relationship with the art of the others, by revealing it from the different aspects that it has assumed according to our gaze as Westerners during the historical construction of museums. Hence the play of the mirrors in the exhibition, in this case illustrating the collectors' gaze. The Moche culture reigned on the north coast of Peru in the years 100-700 A.D. Several ideologically and artistically similar states were reckoned among the culture. Warrior priests that exercised temporal and religious power ruled the Moche society. The Moche ceramists created both sculptural and plain paint-ornamented vessels. The most popular vessel form was the traditional stirrup spout vessel. All vessels were made with the help of a mould. Animals and plants of the coast and scenes of human life and mythology were the decorative motifs of the Moche ceramics. Despite the individual way of depiction, the grandest Moche ceramics helped to justify and reinforce the ideology of the Moche culture and the power of its aristocracy.The most important of the religious rituals of the Moche was apparently the sacrificial ceremony, in which prisoners of ritual wars were sacrificed to gods. Other central scenes of the Moche ceramics are, among other things, funerals of high-ranking persons, hunting of elks and sea lions plus fights between human and supernatural beings. Here you can see a vessel showing an aristocratic building in the foreground and another in the background with a painted fight on the 'body', and a suffering character composing the 'stirrup' spout. Thank you for your kind comments.