The brilliant
object sits on display in a Viennese museum and Mexicos
been wanting it back for decades.
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The
headdress on display at the Museum of Ethnology, Vienna. ALEXANDER
KLEIN/ AFP/ GETTY IMAGES
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IN 1878, THE AUSTRIAN GEOLOGIST and explorer Ferdinand von Hochstetter
went prospecting in the hills above Innsbruck. He wasnt looking
for gold or minerals. Rather, he needed exhibits for a newly founded
Museum of Natural History in Vienna, of which he had just been named
the director. He found what he was looking for in a dusty drawer
of the Renaissance-built Ambras Castlea magnificent piece
of feather work, tucked away in a case together with assorted objects
from North America, China, and the Sunda Islands in Indonesia.
Although it was folded up and somewhat moth-eaten, Hochstetter
quickly realized he was looking at something special: a masterpiece
of Mesoamerican art, probably Aztec, possibly from the court of
Moctezuma II, ninth Aztec emperor who ruled from 1502 to 1520. If
so, it would be one of the few surviving relics of its kind, a rare
direct link to the last indigenous ruler of the Mexica. The possibility
that this object passed directly from the Emperor to the Spanish
conquistador Hernán Cortés gave it a value beyond
price. It also meant that it was destined to be a point of dispute
between the governments of Austria and Mexico up to the present
day.
The largest part of the object is made of nearly 500 tail plumes
from the resplendent quetzal arranged in a semi-circle. These alone
would have been worth a fortune to the Aztecs. Nestled inside this
dazzling green arc is a mosaic made from the body feathers of the
quetzal as well as ones taken from a number of other tropical birds.
Four kinds of gold ornaments sewed to the feathers and arranged
in rows complete the design of the outside. On the reverse side,
each of the feathers is individually tied with maguey thread to
a coarse-meshed fabric on a wicker frame.
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Ferdinand
von Hochstetter. PUBLIC DOMAIN
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Trouble was, Hochstetter didnt know quite what this magnificent
feather work was. It had been entered in the castle inventories
at different times as an Indian apron and a Moorish
hat. After much deliberation and study, he determined that
both of these descriptions were wrong. The item, he decided, was
a standard, a kind of flag that would have accompanied the emperor
or his generals into battle.
Hochstetter published his findings in 1884. Other experts immediately
took issue with his conclusion. It took a pioneering American anthropologist
named Zelia Nuttall to point out the obvious. The feather work wasnt
a body garment or a battle standard: it was a head-dress. The old
label had been right all along.
Nuttall based her arguments about the headdress on a careful
examination of the object itself, conducted on location in Austria,
combined with a detailed comparison to images and descriptions preserved
in surviving Aztec codices. Nuttall published her work in 1887,
as part of the inaugural issue of Harvards Peabody Museum
Papers. When her writing failed to persuade her detractors, she
arrived at the International Congress of Americanists in Paris the
following year sporting a home-made model of the headdress on her
head.
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Zelia
Nuttall. PUBLIC DOMAIN
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The point was made. Less certain, though, was the path the headdress
took to get to the cabinet in Ambras Castle. Hochstetter and Nuttall
were both convinced that it came straight from Moctezuma as part
of a group of presents given to Cortés via intermediaries
shortly after the conquistador arrived in the Central Mexican port
of Veracruz. These were only the second documented group of Mexican
artifacts to reach Europe. Most have gone missing since they arrived
in Spain in 1519.
Experts now think that the Vienna headdress is unlikely to have
come to Ambras Castle directly from Spain. It seems to have spent
some time in the possession of one Count Ulrich of Montfort, an
Austrian nobleman who had served as an envoy to the court in Spain
in the 1560s. It probably wound up in the Innsbruck collection after
he died some time in the 1590s. The headdress has remained in Austria
ever since.
In recent years, there have been a number of voices calling
for the headdress repatriation to Mexico. In 1991, the Mexican
government formally asked for the headdress return. A study
commissioned by the Austrian government claimed that a safe return
would be impossible without a specially designed case to protect
it from the vibrations caused by flight. According to the study,
it would require a plane 984 feet longthe length of 2.7 football
fieldsand 164 feet high to buffer the vibrations caused by
take-off and landing. Since no such plane exists the repatriation
seems unlikely in the short term. In the meantime, visitors to Mexico
City have to content themselves with a rather spectacular replica
of the headdress in Mexicos National Museum of Anthropology.
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A
close up of the replica headdress held at Mexicos Museo
Nacional de Antropología e Historia. THOMAS LEDL/ CC
BY-SA 4.0
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When the Mexico City duplicate was commissioned in 1940, its
identity as a royal crown seemed secure. More recently,
art historians have cast doubt on the headdress identification
with Moctezuma. Christian Feest, a former curator at the Vienna
museum, has pointed out that Aztec emperors wore a gold crown known
as a diadem instead of a feather headdress. Most now believe that
the headdress was of a type used as an offering, worn by priests
during ritual representation of gods. But it still seems likely
to have been made in the royal workshops of Tenochtitlan before
the arrival of the conquistadors. Certainly, the sheer extravagance
of the piece suggests it was made for the head of a royal.
In the words of the Australian historian Inga Clendinnen, the
Aztecs, or Mexica, passionately prized feathers as projections
into this dimmed world of the light, color, and exquisite delicacy
of the world of the gods. They called their most valued feathers
and feather work the Shadows of the Sacred Ones. The
royal featherworkers, the amantecas, worked in a part of the emperors
palace called the Totocalli or House of Birds. There they made the
emperors feather garments, shields and fans. There they also
kept hundreds of birds of various kinds alive in cages. According
to the conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo, 300 men were employed
solely in keeping them fed and cared for.
Feathers were a much desired trade good. Conquered provinces
paid tribute in feathers. Most magnificent of all was the quetzal,
native to the cloud forests of Honduras and Guatemala.
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An
illustration of Moctezuma II from the 15th-century manuscript
The Tovar Codex. PUBLIC DOMAIN
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To us, they might appear green, but this is insufficient. One
Mexica writer described them like so: They are green, herb-green,
very green, fresh green, turquoise colored. They are like wide reeds:
the ones which glisten, which bend. They become green, they become
turquoise. They bend, they constantly bend; they glisten.
The Aztecs believed that in the afterlife, warriors returned
to life in the form of splendidly ornamented birds. They dwelt in
a realm called the Place of the Flowering Tree. All things bright
with color, whether they be sparkling gems, brightly colored flowers,
or birds with iridescent plumage, issued from this higher plane
of reality. Featherworks like the Vienna headdress were thus always
about more than decoration or display. They were messages from another
world.
In the years after the Spanish conquest, the traditions that
informed the making of the Moctezuma headdress underwent a process
of translation. The Place of the Flowering Tree was reinterpreted
as the Christian Heaven, and the amantecas of the palace were put
to work crafting feather icons for the Catholic Church. Over the
centuries, the Moctezuma Headdress changed meanings and identities
as well as it passed from being a royal gift to curio to exhibit
in an ethnographic museum. For the time being at least, it seems
that it will be frozen in this current role.
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