Art & Technology. Fall 2023 Getty Scholars Program
Ancient Mexico Featherwork
Los Angeles, California
September - December, 2023
Native to the Americas, hummingbirds are featured in the Florentine Codex and used to signify the god of war, Huitzilopochtli. Iridescent feathers were a valuable status symbol in pre-Hispanic Mexico and during Colonial times they were highly appreciated. María Olvido Moreno Guzmán, scholar at GRI for 2023, applies archaeometric techniques to create an inventory of the tiny hummingbird feathers used by the “colonial amantecas”, the feather artists that after the Conquest made mosaics with Christian iconography.
New Spain feather mosaics have been studied mainly by art historians, historians, anthropologists and conservators. Thanks to them, today we have relevant information about their biography, iconography, meaning, condition and some similarities between them. However, the characterization of the materials and the deep knowledge of the manufacturing techniques and visual strategies are still waiting to be explained. Hundreds of tiny hummingbird feathers were used to make this mosaics; they were millimeter assembled (in the manner of a collage), to create amazing Christian images and liturgical paraphernalia based in one ancestral Mesoamerican technique, a complex mosaic technique that refuses to die.
María Olvido works with 46 stuffed specimens (33 species that inhabit the Mexican territory). She was able to start this research project thanks to the generous loan from John Moore Zoology Laboratory (Occidental College, California) and to the grant “Alfredo Ramos Martínez” from Louis Stern. She will keep working next years to achieve an approximation to the skilled hands who dealt with the iridescent feathers: unusual and restless raw material.
