The Larco Museum is the best museum in Lima, Peru

I know it’s a bold statement, but that’s my humble opinion.

The majority of the museum is Moche ceramics, though it has a bit of everything.

Click on the photo above to see it in more detail.

The entrance to the museum is several vast rooms full of glass cases of thousands of unclassified ceramics, mostly from the Moche culture. It’s an impressive collection of what most museums would keep hidden in back rooms for lack of space. I appreciate that so much is displayed, even if there isn’t a plaque with information for each piece.

They’re grouped together by theme. Dozens of cats shelved together, hundreds of vases shaped like people with fangs, dozens of corn cobs with human faces and hundreds upon hundreds of stirrup-top vases with paintings of all kinds of animals.

Larco Museum’s Erotic Gallery is famous.

Scroll through the photos at your own risk.

The Erotic Gallery is exactly what it sounds like. It’s almost entirely ceramics and most of those are vases or other recipients for liquids. There are plenty of sculptures of animals having sex: deer, monkeys and even mice. Then there are the skeletons having sex, representing the cycle of life and death. Most skeleton ceramics are seen in groups, each skeleton masturbating another. A few skeletons are engaged in solo masturbation.

Another common theme is the ceramics of a man and woman having sex, sometimes while the woman is breastfeeding a baby. Other sculptures are made so that the person drinking from the recipient will have to drink from either a penis or a vagina.

These ceramics were used in fertility ceremonies.

There used to be a section of the Erotic Gallery devoted to homosexual sculptures and the role of homosexuality in pre-Incan cultures. Unfortunately, that exhibit has disappeared. I hope it’s not the effect of conservative politics on art and archeology, though I can’t think of any other reason to remove an entire exhibit like that from a private museum.