Contingent Images: Looking Obliquely at Colonial Mexican Featherwork in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

What did early modern European audiences make of the iridescent surfaces of colonial Mexican featherwork? While much previous scholarship relates their appeal to brightness, they also exhibit chromatic instability activated by alterations in the angle of illumination or view. This plurality of viewing experiences mirrored those provided by a range of other popular forms of contingent media such as anamorphic and ambiguous images. In ways both similar and distinct, featherwork exposed conventions of pictorial representation and the limitations of the sense of sight itself, embodying an epistemological dilemma that was especially important to the intellectual culture of seventeenth-century Spain.