Sacred Places - Easter Island Rapa Nui Moai Figures
by Serge Averbukh
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$5,000
Dimensions
72.000 x 48.000 inches
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Title
Sacred Places - Easter Island Rapa Nui Moai Figures
Artist
Serge Averbukh
Medium
Digital Art - Digital Painting
Description
Introducing 'Sacred Places' Collection by Serge Averbukh, showcasing convergent media paintings of various places of power scattered throughout our planet. Here you will find pieces featuring The Great Sphinx of Giza in front of The Great Pyramid.
Easter Island (Rapa Nui: Rapa Nui, Spanish: Isla de Pascua) is a Chilean island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeastern most point of the Polynesian Triangle. Easter Island is famous for its 887 extant monumental statues, called moai, created by the early Rapa Nui people. In 1995, UNESCO named Easter Island a World Heritage Site, with much of the island protected within Rapa Nui National Park.
Polynesian people most likely settled on Easter Island sometime between 700 and 1100 CE, and created a thriving and industrious culture as evidenced by the island's numerous enormous stone moai and other artefacts. However, human activity, the introduction of the Polynesian rat and overpopulation led to gradual deforestation and extinction of natural resources which severely weakened the Rapa Nui civilization. By the time of European arrival in 1722, the island's population had dropped to 2,000–3,000 from an estimated high of approximately 15,000 just a century earlier. European diseases and Peruvian slave raiding in the 1860s further reduced the Rapa Nui population, to a low of only 111 inhabitants in 1877.
Moai or Mo‘ai, are monolithic human figures allegedly carved by the Rapa Nui people on Easter Island in eastern Polynesia between the years 1250 and 1500 A.D. Nearly half are still at Rano Raraku, the main moai quarry, but hundreds were transported from there and set on stone platforms called ahu around the island's perimeter. Almost all moai have overly large heads three-eighths the size of the whole statue. The moai are chiefly the living faces (aringa ora) of deified ancestors (aringa ora ata tepuna). The statues still gazed inland across their clan lands when Europeans first visited the island in 1722, but all of them had fallen by the latter part of the 19th century.
The production and transportation of the more than 900 statues are considered remarkable creative and physical feats. The tallest moai erected, called Paro, was almost 10 metres (33 ft) high and weighed 82 tons; the heaviest erected was a shorter but squatter moai at Ahu Tongariki, weighing 86 tons; and one unfinished sculpture, if completed, would have been approximately 21 metres (69 ft) tall with a weight of about 270 tons. The moai toppled after European contact when islander traditions radically changed. At some point after the 1722, all of the moai that had been erected on ahus were toppled, with the last standing statues reported in 1838, and no upright statues by 1868, apart from the partially buried ones on the outer slopes of Rano Raraku.
Oral histories include one account of a clan pushing down a single moai in the night but others refer to the "earth shaking" and other indications that at least some of them fell down through earthquakes. Some of the moai toppled forward such that their faces were hidden and often fell in such a way that their necks broke; others fell off of the back of their platforms. Today, about 50 moai have been re-erected on their ahus or at museums elsewhere. Eleven or more moai have been removed from the island and transported to locations around the world, including six out of the thirteen moai that were carved from basalt.
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December 24th, 2016
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