In full plume: Tracing the long, transcultural history of feathers in art

Earlier this semester, a group of scholars gathered at Yale for a day-long discussion about a subject of surprising weight: feathers. 

The workshop, called “Feathers: A Transcultural Art History,” grew out of a dialogue between Marisa Bass and Allison Caplan, professors in the history of art department, about their mutual engagement with the long history of feathers in art. The event drew scholars — including literary historians, curators, conservators, and experts in visual and material cultures — from various universities and museums. 

In addition to a series of discussions, the scholars visited the Yale Peabody Museum to study examples of featherwork with Yale ornithologist Richard Prum, who shared his research on the aesthetic biology of feathers. 

For birds, feathers serve a number of practical purposes: they enable flight, offer insulation from the cold and waterproofing, and convey ornamental displays for courtship. But for humans, the broad array of colors found in feathers, their capacity to reflect light, and their unique physical structures have made them the stuff of — as well as the subject of — various art forms for centuries. 

Yale News recently sat down with Caplan and Bass, both members of Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, to talk about the cultural value of feathers, why not all feathers are created equal, and the mysterious provenance of a feathered native North American headdress in a museum in Rome. The conversation has been condensed and edited. 

Why feathers? 

Allison Caplan: Feathers are a shared interest between Marisa and myself. In my work I explore how Indigenous people of the Aztec empire thought about and experienced value, and feathers were one of the most valued materials in ancient Mesoamerica. They carried economic value, but they were also intensely aesthetic, a material that people formed important emotional relationships with. So that’s the interest for me. But Marisa and I together were really interested in thinking about it more globally, how it is that people are interacting with feathers in the context of making art. 

Marisa Bass: I am currently working on a book — a broad history of birds in art — that is focused on moments when artists really pay attention to the qualities of birds: how bird behaviors like song, display, et cetera, get translated into art. And because I was thinking about this book as one that crosses time and place and cultures, I thought it would be fun to combine Allison’s expertise with a workshop that brought in people thinking across cultures about what feathers mean in terms of economic and political and spiritual value. 

Why have feathers had so much significance across time and so many cultures? 

Bass: I would say one important reason is that birds are everywhere. There are more birds around the world in different places than any other kind of creatures, except maybe insects. But birds are so visible and are significant in different ways in every culture. 

Caplan: I think about it in terms of this intense engineering that birds have done over the course of their evolution, to be able to move light in ways that are unparalleled and incredibly striking for humans who are interacting with them. That sort of appreciation for what it is that birds have been able to do in terms of developing these incredibly complicated structures that alter light in all these ways to create intense visual experiences. It has a magnetism for people, especially for artists. 

What are some ways in which feathers have been used or depicted in art? 

Caplan: A primary one is as adornments that are worn on the body. That was certainly true in Mesoamerica. Feathers were used in assemblages that were meant to cover and transform the whole body. But one of the things we saw through our recent workshop was the extent to which that really characterizes their use in a lot of the world. We got to hear from Christina Hellmich, who’s a specialist in Oceanic feather-working, about the creation of feather capes in Hawaii, where there’s a tradition of thinking about a deep connection between feather adornments and the owner of those adornments. 

Bass: Another area is the use of feathers as a medium to make representational art and abstract art. The cutting of feathers into different shapes to make compositions. During our visit to the Yale Peabody Museum, we looked at these incredible bird pins that were made from kingfisher feathers, which have a natural iridescence. The feathers have been cut, so they’re fixed in place, almost like lacquer, like inlaid gems. When you look at the pins really closely you see that they’re made of feathers. But then, these are feathers that have been cut to look like feathers, so they’re feathers being used to represent other feathers. It’s a sophisticated meta discourse about what a feather is and the relationship between birds’ artistry in making feathers and an artist’s artistry in making art. 

Not all feathers are created equal, in terms of their cultural and economic value, correct? 

Bass: You’re absolutely right. In cultures where feathers have specific values, they have widely variable values. But on another level, all feathers are awesome and remarkable because of their sophisticated physical structure, as Alison mentioned earlier. European artists used feathers of domesticated birds like ducks and geese as tools. Using a goose feather not only as a pen to make a drawing, but also as a tool to erase or blend or smooth, was a way of being engaged with a feather as a remarkable thing that had capacities that no other tool had. There were other things artists used as erasers in their studios, but nothing had the subtlety of a feather.

Caplan: In ancient Mesoamerica, some feathers were so sought after that they were traded over hundreds or even a thousand miles. Probably the most famous case of this is the resplendent quetzal. This is a type of bird that lives in the neotropics of what is now Guatemala. Adult males grow two or three long, upper-tail, covert feathers that are this emerald green that also shades into gold or purple, depending on the angle that you’re seeing it from. And they’re up to 80 centimeters long. These feathers were intensely valued because of their color display, but also because of the way in which they move — like reeds, they’re able to arc and bend. So there was this intense aesthetic performativity and power to these feathers. People developed trade routes across almost the entire Mesoamerican world in order to get access to them.

As you talk about the intense human desire for some feathers, I can’t help but think of the Audubon Society, which was founded in 1905 in response to the slaughter of so many birds for feathers to adorn fancy hats for women. Has this happened in other cultures, where the perceived value of feathers runs up against concern about the loss of birds? 

Caplan: For ancient Mesoamerica, it’s important to think about the different scale of production. These tended to be works that were produced for really particular wearers, usually elites, rulers, and embodiments of gods. The commoner class usually were legally prohibited from wearing these. So that placed a limit on the extent to which you had hunting of these birds. 

Bass: One of the fascinating things that I learned from our workshop was from Olivia Milburn [from the University of Hong Kong], who spoke about Chinese feather work. There is discussion in early Chinese sources about questions of extinction. Feathers were being used for the kind of highly specialized artworks that Allison just described, but also for large-scale purposes, like for the Chinese army. And there is a component of hunting that always goes along with the collection of feathers. There are a lot of birds that you can’t just go pluck a feather from. So underlying the beauty and admiration for feathers, there is a larger history of violence. 

What about the impact of colonial encounters on indigenous feather work? 

Bass: These traditions are extremely important to certain cultures and yet are often not represented in the places where they transpired. For example, Ellen Pearlstein [from UCLA’s Getty Program in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage] spoke about how native North American headdresses became emblematic objects to have in a European collection to represent America, but often without much sensitivity to what those items meant or even how they came to be there. 

She was working on a warbonnet headdress in a museum in Rome that has zero provenance attached to it. She was looking at the materials to see if they could provide any indications of where it was from and how it might have gotten there. She found that the feathers came almost exclusively from a single juvenile eagle, which tells us something about the context in which it was produced. The creators of that warbonnet were using primarily wing feathers — of which there are more on an eagle — instead of tail feathers, which suggests a reduced ability to access feathers. Which means it is probably a later object, and maybe even something made for a traveling Wild West show that then became an object that was put into a museum, as if it was an authentic indigenous object. 

Caplan: That issue was also the focus of the talk by Amy Buono [from Chapman University], who discussed how, under colonialism in Brazil, Indigenous Tupi feather cloaks were taken to Europe, where almost all remain today, which has long-standing repercussions for the relationships between contemporary Tupi people, their environment, and the featherworks themselves. 

In central Mexico, we see related colonial histories. One of the major transformations that happened when colonization started in Mexico was you had this centuries-long tradition of working feathers as insignia to be worn on the body, but at the same time, there was an increasing demand from Europeans to create works in feathers that were in close dialogue with techniques and materials of European paintings. One of the things that came out of that new art form of feather paintings was the use of iridescent hummingbird feathers as something that provides color and fills the ground of works on wood panel or copper plate. There, hummingbird feathers take the role of paint, but also have capacities that go well beyond what paint can do. 

Marisa, you are a specialist in early modern European art. Did those artists have their own appreciation for feathers?

Bass: The German artist Albrecht Dürer famously made a trip from Nuremberg to the Netherlands in 1520 and kept a diary. There’s a passage in the diary that’s become one of the most cited passages for understanding how Europeans responded to feather work when they first encountered it. After seeing feather work brought from Mesoamerica to the court of Emperor Charles V. Dürer writes this incredible passage in which he calls them the most amazing things he’s ever seen and talks about them being wondrously artful objects. 

But Dürer was also fascinated by feathers as objects to represent in his art long before he saw these examples. He was one of the early artists really engaged in close nature study, as evidenced by stunning surviving watercolors that are now in the Albertina in Vienna. For instance, there’s a watercolor of the wing of a blue roller that shows his interest in the difference between a flight feather and a down feather, and in their vibrant colors. So I think European artists had an appreciation for the feather, even though they had never seen a resplendent quetzal or the feather headdresses being produced by Indigenous artists in the Americas. They too understood that the feather was a remarkable thing.