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Two of the most significant cases of extant 16th-century featherwork from Mexico are the so-called Moctezuma’s headdress and the Ahuizotl shield. While the feathers used in these artworks exhibit lightfast colors, their assembly comprises mainly organic materials, which makes them extremely fragile. Printed media, including books, catalogs, educational materials, and fine copies, offer an accessible means for audiences to document and disseminate visual aspects of delicate cultural artifacts without risking their integrity. Nevertheless, the singular brightness and iridescent colors of feathers are difficult to communicate to the viewer in printed reproductions when traditional pigments are used. This research explores the use of effect pigments (multilayered reflective structures) and improved halftoning techniques for additive printing, with the objective of enhancing the reproduction of featherwork by capturing its changing color and improving texture representation via a screen printing process. The reproduced images of featherwork exhibit significant perceptual resemblances to the originals, primarily owing to the shared presence of structural coloration. We applied structure-aware halftoning to better represent the textural qualities of feathers without compromising the performance of effect pigments in the screen printing method. Our prints show angle-dependent color, although their gamut is reduced. The novelty of this work lies in the refinement of techniques for printing full-color images by additive printing, which can enhance the 2D representation of the appearance of culturally significant artifacts.

Two of the most significant cases of extant 16th-century featherwork from Mexico are the so-called Moctezuma's headdress and the Ahuizotl shield. While the feathers used in these artworks exhibit lightfast colors, their assembly comprises mainly organic materials, which makes them extremely fragile. Printed media, including books, catalogs, educational materials, and fine copies, offer an accessible means for audiences to document and disseminate visual aspects of delicate cultural artifacts without risking their integrity. Nevertheless, the singular brightness and iridescent colors of feathers are difficult to communicate to the viewer in printed reproductions when traditional pigments are used. This research explores the use of effect pigments (multilayered reflective structures) and improved halftoning techniques for additive printing, with the objective of enhancing the reproduction of featherwork by capturing its changing color and improving texture representation via a screen printing process. The reproduced images of featherwork exhibit significant perceptual resemblances to the originals, primarily owing to the shared presence of structural coloration. We applied structure-aware halftoning to better represent the textural qualities of feathers without compromising the performance of effect pigments in the screen printing method. Our prints show angle-dependent color, although their gamut is reduced. The novelty of this work lies in the refinement of techniques for printing full-color images by additive printing, which can enhance the 2D representation of the appearance of culturally significant artifacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the seventeenth century, English audiences were dazzled by the display of indigenous artwork in London's theatres. Red and white feather costumes, constructed by indigenous craftsmen out of scarlet ibis feathers, shone on white actors playing 'Indian' priests; audiences marvelled at the novel display of an indigenous-made hammock displayed onstage; and actors playing conquistadors lazed in a grotto littered with other 'Indian rarities'. This essay attends to one subset of these objects: feather costumes directly made by indigenous artisans or inspired by indigenous designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Decoration with feathers is a universal phenomenon in human history. Objects decorated with feathers were regarded as fine artworks and hence were enormously prized. In ancient China, dotting a surface with blue kingfisher feathers was a famous, complex and delicate decoration technique called diancui. Although various ancient diancui artworks appear in many museums around the world and researchers have realized significant results in studies of the history, technique and conservation of diancui, some key historical details are still not clear. In this research performed during restoration, an important object from the Palace Museum, the “Feather Decoration Hanging Screen with Birds and Flowers Pattern”, was analyzed by various scientific technologies. This object is a Chinese imperial artwork of the Qing dynasty (seventeenth to eighteenth century) decorated with kingfisher feathers and the feathers of several other birds, and it represents the highest level of this period. As a typical and valuable case, the results provide important clues for solving questions arising from related academic fields.

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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.

Decoration with feathers is a universal phenomenon in human history. Objects decorated with feathers were regarded as fine artworks and hence were enormously prized. In ancient China, dotting a surface with blue kingfisher feathers was a famous, complex and delicate decoration technique called diancui. Although various ancient diancui artworks appear in many museums around the world and researchers have realized significant results in studies of the history, technique and conservation of diancui, some key historical details are still not clear. In this research performed during restoration, an important object from the Palace Museum, the "Feather Decoration Hanging Screen with Birds and Flowers Pattern", was analyzed by various scientific technologies. This object is a Chinese imperial artwork of the Qing dynasty (seventeenth to eighteenth century) decorated with kingfisher feathers and the feathers of several other birds, and it represents the highest level of this period. As a typical and valuable case, the results provide important clues for solving questions arising from related academic fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What did early modern European audiences make of the iridescent surfaces of colonial Mexican featherwork? While much previous scholarship relates their appeal to brightness, they also exhibit chromatic instability activated by alterations in the angle of illumination or view. This plurality of viewing experiences mirrored those provided by a range of other popular forms of contingent media such as anamorphic and ambiguous images. In ways both similar and distinct, featherwork exposed conventions of pictorial representation and the limitations of the sense of sight itself, embodying an epistemological dilemma that was especially important to the intellectual culture of seventeenth-century Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the material turn. It shows how an inquiry into the social life of materiality, with distinctive methodologies such as reconstruction and object-led-approaches, changes our understanding of the past. It advances our thinking about the emergence and significance of cross-cultural objects in the context of cultural exchange. The article charts the spectacular rise in importance of feathers in dress during the Renaissance, its relation to collecting practices and relevance well into the seventeenth century. It argues that meanings of featherwork in Europe were influenced by encounters with the Americas, whose artistry sixteenth-century Europeans greatly admired. The dyeing of feathers in multiple colors for headwear and its crafting into intricate shapes turned into a major European fashion trend. Crafts and materials linked to embodied sensory perception and emotional responses. This revises accounts which present this age purely as one of conspicuous consumption designed to celebrate the prestige of rich patrons and instead enquires into how materials interacted with human perception and the mind. Male consumers decisively shaped taste communities. To understand this uncharted and surprising history we need to explore the first age of globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a fashioned ostrich plume to conceptualize and re-present ostrich "feather-work" as being co-constituted by human and non-human labor. The plume archives not only the human hands that fashioned it but also the bird-body that grew the feathers, insisting it be conceptualized and researched as a grown-made commodity. From this starting point, I reconstruct its journey along the "feather-road": from reared and plucked ostrich on a South African ostrich farm to willowed plume in Euro-American sweatshops. By fleshing-out the "hybrid labor" involved in the plume's growing and making, I demonstrate that feather-work not only exploited indigenous African, indentured migrant, and sweated immigrant human laborers, but how it yoked the reproductive and metabolic labor of ostriches. By doing so the paper illustrates how this luxury feather-fashion accessory is historically implicated in colonial, economic, and ecological violence, locating the troubling journeys of fashion's "bio-commodities" further back in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo discute una investigación sobre objetos de plumeria mexicana, con un enfoque en técnicas de fabricación de arte de plumas, colecciones de arte de Plumaria andino y amazónico en Europa y América del Sur, que representan a la civilización mexica.

This paper is concerned with the early documented history of featherwork in China, as described in historical texts and literature up until the end of the Tang dynasty in 907 ce. Although featherwork from several Pacific islands and Latin America has recently been the subject of academic attention, the important Chinese tradition has been neglected. Drawing on studies of featherwork from other cultures, this paper divides these accounts by technical criterion into flexible base featherwork (clothing, curtains, hangings, and coverlets); rigid base featherwork (boxes, architectural detailing, jewelry, and screens); and most remarkably of all, deconstructionist featherwork, whereby the barbs of individual feathers were peeled apart and then spun with a silk core to create a feather thread, which was then woven into cloth. Featherwork was produced in vast quantities in early and medieval China to satisfy demand for these luxurious and brightly colored items, and exotic birds—kingfishers, parrots, pheasants, and so on—were traded across the empire to create these wonderful works of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article talks about the practice of bird hunting in native Hawaiians, stating that birds were an important source of meat. It is noted that the birds ʻuaʻu, also known as Pterodroma sandwicliensis, and tranene, also known as Branta sandvicensis, were an important food source. In the 19th century, the traditional land tenure system was replaced by western land ownership system. It discusses the historical importance of Hawaii's feather work.

Taking a feather fan belonging to the Jerônimo Ferreira das Neves Collection at the D. João VI Museum in Rio de Janeiro as a starting point, this article examines a type of featherwork that was produced for export during the nineteenth century in Brazil. The nineteenth-century fashion for adornments made from feathers and stuffed animals invaded major fashion-producing centers such as Paris and London at the time when bourgeois imperialism was helping to multiply intercontinental trade links. For middle-class women, these objects introduced the exotic as a distinct aesthetic, corresponding to a desire for innovation driven by the growing standardization in food, housing and clothing. Rigid feather fans produced in Rio de Janeiro were internationally known from 1830 onwards. However, even when taking into account existing studies, little is known about this Rio-based rigid feather fan industry, which reached its peak between 1870 and 1890. In reflecting on the production, circulation and consumption of rigid fans, this paper aims to identify the symbolic meanings attributed to the products of this industry by Brazilian and European markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the issue is presented, which discusses reports within the issue on topics including Mexican featherwork, the use of 3D modeling in art history and landscape painting in the 19th century.

Among all presents and trophies brought back to Europe from the Americas during the XVIth century feather works were the most appreciated. Feather art thus became a true symbol of the New World. It has remained so even in recent médias such as comic strips, cinema and publicity. When Christianising the Indians, the Catholic Church gave much importance to feather art and made it into an ambassador in the Old World. During the colonial period this art form, essentially religious and mixed, was developed and melded European influences and indigenous techniques. Numerous pieces associating feathers and gold, precious stones and other materials were created. Feathers were thus used to produce chalices, statues, triptychs, tabernacles, liturgical garments and above all religious images. The Saint Gregory Mass in the Museum of Auch (southern France), dated to 1539, is without doubt the most interesting of these images, in particular due to the presence of indigenous elements. Even though discrete they bear witness to the hand of the tlacuilo, the Aztec "scribepainter". This paper discusses the continuous presence of Indian iconographie elements in the religious art of New Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During moult, stressors such as malaria and related haemosporidian parasites (e.g. Plasmodium and Haemoproteus) could affect the growth rate and quality of feathers, which in turn may compromise future reproduction and survival. Recent advances in molecular methods to study parasites have revealed that co-infections with multiple parasites are frequent in bird-malaria parasite systems. However, there is no study of the consequences of co-infections on the moult of birds. In house martins Delichon urbica captured and studied at a breeding site in Europe during 11 yr, we measured the quality and the growth rate of tail feathers moulted in the African winter quarters in parallel with the infection status of blood parasites that are also transmitted on the wintering ground. Here we tested if the infection with two haemosporidian parasite lineages has more negative effects than a single lineage infection. We found that birds with haemosporidian infection had lower body condition. We also found that birds co-infected with two haemosporidian lineages had the lowest inferred growth rate of their tail feathers as compared with uninfected and single infected individuals, but co-infections had no effect on feather quality. In addition, feather quality was negatively correlated with feather growth rate, suggesting that these two traits are traded-off against each other. We encourage the study of haemosporidian parasite infection as potential mechanism driving this trade-off in wild populations of birds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigation of the light sensitivity of feathers used in Californian material culture revealed that the cultural values held by these materials was crucial for their interpretation. It was evident that feathers are valued both for their tangible and intangible attributes and that tangible qualities, including color and shape, and modification and attachment methods, often have meaning beyond their decorative and practical functions. Several different feather-working cultures, the birds that are important to these communities, how feathers from these birds are used to make featherwork, and how objects reveal changes in tradition over time are examined. Much of this information requires reference to a combination of sources, including historical and contemporary accounts, discussions with native featherworkers, ethnologists and ornithologists, and close examination of feathered objects in museum collections. This multidisciplinary approach leads to a more thorough understanding of feathered objects and aids conservators in better interpreting whether modifications are the result of access to feathers, intentional alterations of cultural use, or museum display. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The appropriation and reproduction of pre-modern graphic materials constituted the ‘primitive’ in modernist and ethnographic discourses. George Bataille’s study of pre-Columbian historical anthropology and his misreading of a reproduction of a figure in a Mexican codex as a scene of human sacrifice initiated his anti-humanist project. Bataille’s parasitic dependency on the pre-modern provides an analytical point of departure towards a critique of modernist cultural relativism. This paper pursues incidents where horror is seated in humanist accounts of early modern mnemonic technologies and pictorial structures from the Arma Christi in a sixteenth-century Mexican featherwork mosaic to the ‘regressive’ Carolingian perspective discussed by Erwin Panofsky. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The experimentation concerns the cleaning of ethnographic featherwork using ultrasonic sound in conjunction with aqueous solutions. Variables such as immersion time and detergent formulations were examined in cleaning various forms and colours of feathers. The results indicate that most dirty feathers can be ultrasonically cleaned with far less stress and handling than has usually been the case in treating soiled ethnographic featherwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including an analysis of a native South American phenolic resin used to decorate cultural heritage objects, a pioneering analytical approach to evaluate the degree of photodegradation of featherwork, and the protective effect of wax coatings on outdoor metalworks.