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The following is a list of History of Art departmental events, events the department is co-sponsoring, and events involving History of Art faculty.  

The First Phoenix of New Spain: Sixteenth-Century Mexican Feathered Microcarving in European Hands

Brendan McMahon
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
4:00-5:00 PM
180 Tappan Hall Map
From the mid-sixteenth to the early seventeenth century, artists working in central Mexico produced a diverse array of portable devotional objects in which minute wooden carvings based on European prints were set against grounds of brightly colored hummingbird feathers. My talk reunites this corpus of feathered microcarvings currently dispersed in collections throughout Europe and the Americas in order to consider their reception by the European audiences for whom they were created. While recent scholarship addressing the migration of featherwork across the Atlantic has theorized its value in relation to early modern artistic debates, this talk instead considers the significance of pairing feathers from a specific family of birds with a limited range of Christian iconography in objects that were intended to serve as instruments of private devotion. Looking at this group through the prism of European commentary addressing the hummingbird’s scale, its colors, and its unique behavior sheds light on the ways in which period audiences collapsed distinctions between curio and devotional object, the study of nature and the contemplation of the divine.
Building: Tappan Hall
Event Type: Lecture / Discussion
Tags: Art, Visual Arts
Source: Happening @ Michigan from History of Art