Mexican featherwork

The book provides the first broad survey of church textiles of Spanish America and demonstrates that while overlooked, textiles were a vital part of visual culture in the Catholic Church. When Catholic churches were built in the New World in the sixteenth century, they were furnished with rich textiles known in Spanish as "church clothing." These textile ornaments covered churches' altars, stairs, floors, and walls. Vestments clothed priests and church attendants, and garments clothed statues of saints. The value attached to these textiles, their constant use, and their stunning visual qualities suggest that they played a much greater role in the creation of the Latin American Church than has been previously recognized. In Clothing the New World Church, Maya Stanfield-Mazzi provides the first

This essay focuses on a unique Mexican folding screen (biombo) created in Mexico in the 17th century depicting a mitote (Moctezuma dance), Indian wedding, and flying pole (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). The text expands the author's earlier analysis of the screen (Casta Painting, 2004;  Una visión del México del Siglo de las Luces, 2006), placing it within the context of Amerindian and viceregal festive traditions.

Soon after the conquistador Hernán Cortés defeated the Mexica (commonly known as the Aztec) in 1521, their capital, Tenochtitlan, with its striking ceremonial center, was transformed into a Spanish city, the new locus of Spanish power and the setting for the emergence of a host of new political and religious rites. While in many ways these festive apparatuses introduced new forms of ritual and advanced a key new message—the willing submission to the Catholic prince—the indigenous communities of Central Mexico had had ample experience with highly ostentatious forms of ritual since pre-Hispanic times. This essay examines a number of texts and images that underscore the participation of Amerindians in festive rites in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Mexico. Panegyric texts such as those describing the entry of a new viceroy or the ceremony of allegiance to a new monarch were carefully constructed to spread the idea of good governance. Native participation remained a fixture of many of these celebrations; how indigenous participants were represented and by whom are more complicated questions that are addressed in this essay.

Previous studies suggest that late postclassic and early colonial Nahua viewers understood specific artistic creations to contain tonalli, a solar-derived animating force. This article advances understanding of the animacy of Nahua featherworks by examining attention to tonalli in the various stages of featherwork production. Analysis of a classificatory distinction used in the sixteenth-century Florentine Codex between tlazohihhuitl (beloved feathers) and macehualihhuitl (commoner feathers) suggests that this distinction registers specific types of feathers' differential ability to contain tonalli. Ultimately, this classification posited tlazohihhuitl as living beings and macehualihhuitl as inanimate materials. The relationship between these two classes of feathers is integral to Nahuatl descriptions of the treatment of specific feather types in the production stages of bird hunting, dyeing and selling feathers, and mosaic construction. Understanding these production practices through Nahuatl descriptions suggests that care for tonalli represented a central commercial and artistic concern in featherwork production.

Link to the journal with higher resolution images:
https://online.ucpress.edu/lalvc/article/3/1/4/116185/Like-the-Flame-of-Fire-A-New-Look-at-the-Hearst

The so-called Hearst Chalice at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is widely regarded as one the most significant works of Mexican silversmithing from the sixteenth century. Its style, technique, and above all its unique combination of materials—including precious metals, feathers, wood carvings, and rock crystal—have led scholars to describe it as the perfect fusion of European and Ancient American (or pre-Columbian) traditions. Surprisingly, despite the consensus about the chalice’s importance, the cultural and artistic conditions that led to the creation of this singular object have not been thoroughly analyzed. By closely examining the different material components of the imposing artifact—which though carefully assembled also stand as independent units—we can better understand its uniqueness and symbolic potential. This essay espouses a synoptic approach by considering a range of agencies, perspectives, and sources—documentary and material—to restore the “Hearst” Chalice to its rightful context, without aspiring to a totalizing view of the past or a definitive decoding of its system of meaning. Categorizing its form and function as purely Indigenous and European poses a distinct set of challenges and limits its hermeneutic possibilities. The work—like many others created during the volatile period following the fall of Tenochtitlan—encodes a new visual language that reveals the highly subtle process of negotiation of these two cultures in a particular space and time. Moving away from the reductive concept of syncretism, the essay offers a fresh look at this impressive contact period work and its shifting values over time.

Colorful feathers were an important part of the regalia and martial attributes of the Mexicas, who used them on headdresses, shields, capes, but also on the images of their gods. Despite the early interest of Europeans in the American featherwork, some bird species used by the amanteca remain undetermined to this day. The thorough study of two manuscripts written under the direction of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, the Primeros Memoriales and the Florentine Codex, has revealed an inconsistency between the way the toztli, or "yellow parrot," has been described and depicted in the colonial sources, and its current identification as the Amazona oratrix. This bird is more likely to have been a rarer specimen, native to lands located far from the Mexica heartland. [

Destellos de lo sagrado: la funcionalidad de la plumaria en la capilla del Ochavo de la catedral de Puebla de los Ángeles Ponencia presentada en III Simposio Internacional de Jóvenes Investigadores del Barroco Iberoamericano, Sevilla (Marzo 2017) La llegada a Europa desde tierras novohispanas de cuadros, mitras y otros objetos constituidos o bien decorados por mosaicos de plumas, supuso el encuentro y adaptación de una técnica de raigambre prehispánica con un amplio repertorio de formas de origen occidental. Una vez establecidos los centros de producción destinados a la elaboración de este tipo de piezas y su demanda (documentados en Michoacán, el centro de México y Puebla), el siglo XVII supuso para este arte la introducción de innovaciones formales y cromáticas, además de su notable adecuación en el ámbito religioso local. La capilla del Ochavo en la Catedral de Puebla custodia lo que hoy se considera como una de las colecciones más importantes de arte plumario conservadas en México. Las cuatro piezas que conforman el conjunto son parte del acervo artístico con el que se inauguró esta singular capilla en 1688. Estas láminas presentan una instancia excepcional que permite aproximarnos a la cuestión de su consumo en el contexto novohispano, y particularmente entre el alto clero de finales del siglo XVII y principios del siglo XVIII. Para ello, este trabajo presenta y analiza nuevos hallazgos documentales relacionados con el modo en que estas piezas fueron exhibidas en dicho recinto catedralicio, de cara a la recuperación del sentido original de su programa decorativo y, especialmente, del valor simbólico de la pluma como material. Así, como otros objetos presentes en la capilla, los que nos interesan producen un particular brillo e iridiscencia, efectos que probarán ser imprescindibles para la manifestación de lo sagrado en su interior.

In ancient Mexico feathers were considered precious. They had a relevant material value for the indigenous populations and were used by wealthy or powerful individuals as accessories, headdress or ornaments complementing their fashionable attire, to decorate high-ranking soldiers’ shields, or to ornate statues of the gods. After the Conquest and the fall of the “Aztec empire”, Mexican objects made of or decorated with feathers quickly attracted the attention of Spanish Conquistadores and missionary friars sent to convert the “newly discovered” people. As a result, several feather artefacts were sent back to Europe, while in Mexico a new application to featherwork was born: feathery versions of Christian images.
This essay aims to tell the history of Christian featherwork that arrived in Italy in the 16th and early 17th century. I’ll start by canvassing the presence of feather artifacts in important Italian collections of the time, including that of at least four Popes and those in the hands of the Medici. I will then explore where and in what context these artifacts were displayed. Finally, I will provide an assessment regarding the underlying motivations of appreciation and success of such works based on the analysis of selected contemporary documents by various authors.

Commenting two new publications on two early material testimonies of Mexican history, UNESCO documents of the history of mankind: the so called feather crown of the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma in Vienna and the XVIth century renaissance paintings in the house of the Dean of cathedral chapter in Puebla.

Also available in English as: 'Dystopia' & cat. nos. 25. Circle of Jörg Breu - Fool’s Platter; 36. Joachim Patinir - The Destruction of Sodom & Gomorra; 38. Follower of Hieronymus Bosch - Vision of Tondal; 39. Pieter Huys (?) - The Last Judgement; 40. Follower of Hieronymus Bosch - Apocalyptic Vision; 48. Mesoamerican feather mosaic after Antwerp prototype - Adoration of the Magi; 53. [with Hannah Iterbeke] Lopo Homem a/o - Miller Atlas. In: Jan Van der Stock J. (ed.), In Search of Utopia: Art and Science in the Era of Thomas More. Amsterdam / Leuven: Amsterdam University Press / Davidsfonds, pp. 182-185, 233-237, 242-253, 284-287, 304-307.