Empires of feathers
On the penacho de Moctezuma
The Los Angeles Times recently published a story about the penacho de Moctezuma, a quetzal feather headdress from early 16th century Mexico that resides in the Weltmuseum in Vienna. (Click through for a stunning photo I don’t have permission to republish.) The impossibly long and undulating quetzal feathers are shimmering green, supported on a base decorated with gold discs and feathers from other bird species in vibrant sky blue, clay brown, and dark pink. Even the gray feathers used to fill in the less visible parts of the work may have come from eagles. It originally sported a gold beak, and pieces of it could fold in and extend out like bird wings.
Very little is known about the penacho, including whether Moctezuma ever wore it, whether it was stolen or gifted, or even if it was originally a headdress. The first record of it shows up in 1596, in a catalogue of an Austrian archduke’s “Chamber of Art and Wonders,” which calls it a “Moorish hat” and references the now-lost beak. (The way 16th century European Christians saw every cultural other through the eyes they used to look at the Islamic world is really something.) Whatever the penacho’s precise history, it’s the cultural object that Mexico most wants repatriated, and the one that is least likely to come home. The Weltmuseum says it’s far too fragile to travel. The Anthropology Museum in Mexico City displays a replica, holding out hope it will one day be replaced by the real thing.
I’m especially into Mesoamerican feathers recently because of my latest research obsession, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City by Barbara Mundy (previously discussed here). For the Mexica, feathers weren’t just a beautiful artistic material or an exotic adornment for the elite. They were a physical representation of imperial power. Feathers arrived in Tenochtitlan’s workshops as tribute from the lands conquered by the Triple Alliance, with different colors and species becoming available as the empire expanded. An object like the penacho, ostentatiously assembled from the feathers of several species, could be read as something like a map of the empire at the time it was made.
Featherworks were among the riches Moctezuma sent as gifts the new European arrivals in 1519. They were objects of stunning beauty and staggering artistry, and they were also an implied threat. Feathers were the embodiment of the Mexica’s campaign of subjugation and conquest, the power of the imperial center to extract and transform the riches of the periphery. Of course the would-be invaders missed this subtext entirely.
This first round of gifts, and many future rounds of plunder, sent Europe into spasms of wonder and greed that resulted in Mesoamerican featherworks, and their current locations, representing the reach of entirely different empires. I learned from the LA Times story that the original repatriation request for the penacho came from Maximilian, a Hapsburg who was briefly installed as the emperor of Mexico by European forces in the 1860s. He wanted the penacho to boost his shaky legitimacy by connecting his rule back to the Aztecs. His brother, the Austrian emperor, declined to send it back.
