The Creation of a Medium: Featherwork in the Early Modern Period

Rebecca Lowery, M.A.

My dissertation, titled “The Creation of a Medium: Featherwork in the Early Modern Period,” examines mosaic featherwork, an artistic mode in which feathers are cut and arranged into compositions. I focus on featherwork within two broad contexts: central Mexico from roughly 1400-1650, and Northern Italy around 1600. Significantly, these are not monolithic categories which correspond to a totalizing narrative whereby featherwork is produced in Mexico and collected in Europe. To define the medium according to such a geographic binary reflects broader institutional divisions, one that my dissertation aims to bridge. Rather, I define both as containing diverse locales of production and collection. I foreground a complex geography of production within Mexico and reassess Italian mosaic featherworking as an artistic tradition. I argue that how featherwork was made, where, and by whom, cannot be separated from how it was seen, categorized, and valued by the audiences, collectors, and scholars who encountered it. Our conception of featherwork as a historical artistic mode is fundamentally historiographic.