Arte plumaria — Mesoamerican featherwork under Spanish patronage
The Nahua amantecatl laid undyed bird feathers into pictures. After the conquest the craft was redirected rather than ended: friars and Spanish householders commissioned feather images and retablos, painters supplied the drawing and the featherworkers the colour, and Torquemada describes twenty craftsmen dividing one image between them and rejoining it seamlessly. The same chapters carry the cost, including the friar's contempt for what those makers had painted before.
Why this wins its question: Featherwork usually reaches English readers as a caption on Moctezuma's headdress in Vienna: a pre-conquest marvel, implicitly destroyed in 1521. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts describe something else — a workshop that kept running, with a documented division of labour between painter and featherworker, a named craft title, twenty masters splitting one image and rejoining it invisibly, undyed colours sorted bird by bird, and a European market that took the results home. This object quotes that from the digitised pages of Motolinía and Torquemada, and prints in the same breath the temple vestments the craft lost and the friar's judgement on the art it had made before.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Motolinía gives the craft its name and its division of labour. "Amantecatl", he writes, "que así se llama el maestro de esta obra que asienta la pluma"; a painter first draws the "muestra ó dibujo", and the featherworker then lays the plumage to it. He adds that the Spaniards took the word and extended it to craftsmen of every trade, "mas propiamente no pertenece sino á estos de la pluma, que los otros oficiales cada uno tiene su nombre".
Motolinía uses that division to explain a defect rather than to excuse one. If pieces sent to Spain arrived "imperfecta y con figuras feas", he says, the fault lay with the painters who drew the pattern, not with the amantecas: "y si á estos amantecas les dan buena muestra de pincel, tal sacan su obra de pluma; y como ya los pintores se han perfeccionado, hacen muy hermosas y perfectas imágenes y dibujos de pluma y oro." Of the masters themselves he writes that "en España y en Italia los tendrian por muy primos".
Torquemada places the craft's centre in Michoacán and ranks it above every other: "lo que parece exceder à todo ingenio humano, es el Oficio, y Arte de labrar de Pluma, en la Provincia de Mechoacàn, con sus mismas naturales colores asentadas, todo aquello, que los mui primos Pintores pueden pintar con Pinceles." He lists what was made of feathers — birds, animals, men, capes or mantles to cover oneself, "Vestiduras para los Sacerdotes de el Templo", crowns or mitres, shields and fly-whisks — and names the colours: green, blue, red, blond, purple, flesh, yellow, brown, black and white.
The colours were not dyed. Torquemada states that they were "no teñidas por ninguna industria humana, sino todas naturales, tomadas y avidas de diversas Aves", and draws the consequence for the birds: "y à esta causa tenian en gran precio qualquiera especie de Aves, porque de todas se aprovechaban, hasta de los mui minimos Pajaritos."
Torquemada records a workshop practice that is the most technically striking thing in either source: "si son veinte Oficiales, toman à hacer vna Imagen todos ellos juntos, y dividiendo entre sì la Figura de la Imagen, en tantas partes, quantos ellos son, cada vno toma su pedaço, y lo và à hacer à su Casa, y despues viene cada vno con èl, y lo vàn juntando con otros, y de esta suerte viene à quedar la Imagen tan perfecta, y acabada, como si vn solo Oficial la huviera obrado."
The redirection of the craft is stated by Torquemada as a change of subject matter, and dated to the arrival of European images: "despues que vieron nuestras Imagenes, y cosas mui diferentes de las suias, como en ellas han tenido larga materia de estender, y avivar sus ingenios; es cosa maravillosa, con quanta perfeccion se exercitan en aquella su sutil, y para nosotros nueva Arte, haciendo Imagenes, Retablos, y otras cosas de sus manos, dignas de ser presentadas à Principes, Reies, y Sumos Pontifices." He adds that after such pieces had served in the churches at the principal feasts, "las piden los Españoles para ponerlas en sus Aposentos, como Imagenes perfectas, y devotas".
A cheaper parallel craft grew beside it. The same page records that what the feather masters did with plumage, "otros mui comunes, y deshechados, hacen de Rosas de diversos colores", gumming the petals and leaves onto a petate according to the colour each part of the figure required, and producing images of saints, coats of arms and lettering by the same method.
Feathers had been valuable enough to price against a person. Motolinía, describing the birds of a Veracruz estuary, writes of black ducks with partly white wings "de estos sacan las plumas de que tejen las mantas ricas de pluma; solia valer uno de estos en la tierra dentro un esclavo", and notes that Castilian ducks were then being kept for plucking, "la pluma de los de Castilla no es tan buena como la de los de esta tierra". Of another bird, the teocacholli, he says the Indians held them for gods for their beauty and their preciousness.
The praise and the contempt sit in the same chapter and both belong on the record. On the page immediately before the featherwork passage Torquemada writes that before they were Christians the Nahua painters did not paint men beautiful "sino feos, y medio monstruos, que parece lo permitia Dios, que la figura de sus Cuerpos asemejase à la que tenian sus Almas, por el pecado en que siempre permanecian". The friar who calls their feather art the thing that exceeds all human ingenuity is the same friar who explains their earlier image-making as a mark of sin.
What survived was a technique put to new subjects, not a craft left alone: among the products Torquemada assigns to the pre-conquest workshops are the vestments of the temple priests, and the images, retablos and mitres he praises in his own day are Christian. Neither source read here says how many amantecas were working, what they were paid, whether they worked freely or under repartimiento, or what happened to the craft after the seventeenth century, and none of that is asserted. Neither names a featherworker; the one indigenous artist Torquemada names in these chapters is a sculptor, Miguèl Mauricio of the town of Santiago.