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The Clown at Midnight: Coulrophobia, Counterculture, and the Decadent Pierrot Mask

by Samuel Love

Writing Pyrotechnic Insanitarium (1999), an apocalyptic account of twentieth-century Western culture, Mark Dery was sure of one thing: “all the world hates a clown.”¹ In Dery’s eyes, the clown persistently haunted the waning century, resulting in the appearance of the term “coulrophobia”—an uncontrollable fear of clowns in popular discourse. The association between clowns and fear was so strong that Robert Bloch, author of 1959 cult classic Psycho, stated “the essence of true horror” was reified in “the clown, at midnight.”² This fear, Dery argued, resulted from “the duplicity implied by the frozen grins and false gaiety of clowns…[Their] transparent artificiality constantly directs our attention to what’s behind the mask.”³ In other words, what provoked this visceral reaction was an uncanny failure of authenticity.

Dery could have observed the same phenomenon a century earlier. Beginning in the 1880s, the figure of Pierrot, the white-faced clown of the commedia dell’ arte, proliferated in the cultural imaginary of European modernism. This renewed interest paralleled the emergence of what would now be considered early coulrophobic reactions.⁴ Pierrot became a totem for the artists and writers who were, often self-consciously, considered to be “Decadents”—representatives of a French (or more generally, Western European) artistic movement characterized by its hedonism, pessimism, and provocative defiance of social and moral convention—precisely because of the destabilizing force of the clown’s artifice.

This allegiance between artist and clown has typically been viewed with suspicion in modernist scholarship. Benjamin Buchloh’s seminal 1981 polemic “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression” evinced a form of conceptual coulrophobia in attacking specifically the utilization of commedia imagery as “enforced regression…the clown functions as a social archetype of the artist as an essentially powerless, docile, entertaining figure.”⁵ But in Decadent circles and those they influenced, Pierrot recurs for the opposite reasons. For example, the French graphic artist Jules Chéret (1836–1932) spoke for his generation in valorizing the Pierrot costume’s “mysteriousness…which disquiets the spectator with [its] expressionless white face….the hermetic curtain behind which one will try to see the man.”⁶ This essay explores how the uncanny inauthenticity of the Pierrot mask has been harnessed from nineteenth-century Decadents to their progenies in the “pyrotechnic insanitarium” of the twentieth, the aesthetes of glam rock who Dery acknowledged as the rightful heirs to Decadent art, to articulate a radical disidentification with contemporary social and moral conventions.⁷

The history of the Decadent Pierrot has been extensively elucidated in extant scholarship.⁸ Nascent in touring Italian pantomimes of the sixteenth century, the figure of a naïve Pierrot typically falls in love with the wholesome Columbine, who rejects him for the rougher, bolder Harlequin. Resultantly, Pierrot came to stand for a generalized sense of marginalization in Romantic circles in the nineteenth century. Pierrot emerged in the performances of Joseph Grimaldi (1778–1837) in London and Jean-Gaspard Deburau (1796–1846) in Paris, two actors whose tragic personal lives were popularly thought to underpin their interpretations of the suffering clown.⁹ The same circles appreciated the work of the French Rococo master Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), whose isolated, mysterious Pierrot in Gilles dovetailed with their theatrical tastes (fig. 1). Although art historian Judy Sund has disproven that Watteau’s Pierrots were melancholy ciphers for the artist’s outsider status, this Romantic fiction perhaps took deep root because of pervasive associations between clowns and outsiders.¹⁰ Dery traces the origins of clowns to the disabled, impoverished, or otherwise non-normative performers of antiquity, establishing what he terms the “clown/freak connection” and the concretization of the clown as “abnormal or nonhuman Other.”¹¹

The model of the clown inherited by late nineteenth-century Decadents was steeped in the language of suffering, rejection, and abnegation. It is precisely in this milieu that Pierrot’s alienation, rather than divested of meaning through repetition, as Buchloh suggests, was reinvigorated by the extent to which these attributes were embraced to épater la bourgeoisie. The association between the clown and marginal, transgressive identities inevitably led to the assumption that what was uncannily concealed by the inscrutable mask was a source of danger; as evidenced in Chéret’s enthusiasm for Pierrot, this was duly exploited by Decadent artists.

It was Chéret who provided illustrations for Pierrot Sceptique, a “pantomime” co-authored by the arch-Decadent J. K. Huysmans, in which Pierrot’s white blouse is symbolically replaced by black evening dress. Huysman’s Pierrot, no longer merely a sufferer, is a murderer and an arsonist in his own right.¹² Chéret’s illustrations belie the interest in coulrophobia that Pierrot’s painted face could trigger. The discrepancy between the clown’s sadism and his fixed, atavistic, curiously apelike grin engenders this reaction (fig. 2). In canvases which have since largely disappeared into private collections, Chéret frequently depicted Pierrot as an airborne wraith menacingly toying with the chorus girls of the newly founded playhouse Moulin Rouge, its windmill a symbol of both the glamor and danger of fin-de-siecle Montmartre.

Indeed, the Moulin Rouge was itself designed by Adolphe Willette, who was known to sign his works as “Pierrot.” Willette also painted a mural for the nearby nightclub La Chat Noir that anticipates Mark Dery’s “pyrotechnic insanitarium” in its apocalyptic vision. Titled Parce Domine (fig. 3), a Pierrot attired in the same fashion as Chéret’s leads a bacchic procession of naked women, wolves, wraiths, and clowns down from the windmills of Montmartre and into a rapidly disintegrating landscape; the head of Willette’s procession brandishes a smoking pistol before him. Such atavistically violent Pierrots also permeate Willette’s minor works, evinced in drawings such as the brutish Pierrot the Murderer (fig. 4).

The theme of Pierrot as a threatening, violent force was reprised in the twentieth century by the likes of Gustav-Adolf Mossa and Leo Rauth. Mossa’s Pierrot of the Minute (fig. 5) (1908), indicating the influence of Huysmans and Chéret, features Pierrot brandishing a bloodied knife while clad in the immaculate garb of an eighteenth-century nobleman. Rauth’s subject of the monstrous and ironically named A Welcome Guest (1912), armed only with a bouquet of roses and a twisted grimace, seems to stream with blood from the illusionistic tumult of red ribbon clutched at his throat (fig. 6). Such creatures belong to the ranks of what journalist Benjamin Radford terms “bad clowns… vigilante antiheroes of the id”: inscrutable, inhuman beings whose painted faces at once conceal and suggest a sadistic moral void beneath.¹³

Yet, not all Pierrots became monsters; some simply embraced the artificiality of their pose, constituting the clown’s conceptual affront to authenticity as opposed to the visceral affront provided by his uncanny appearance. The decadent poet Arthur Symons understood Pierrot as “condemned to be always in public….he must remember to be fantastic if he would not be merely ridiculous….And so he becomes exquisitely false.”¹⁴ This is precisely the inauthenticity that enraged Buchloh in clownish iconographies, translated into psychological terms by Martin Green and John Swan who argue that “to feel oneself to be a commedia character gives one a sense of self that is hard to combine with…marriage and parenthood.”¹⁵ It is perhaps fitting that Arthur Symons was writing of his friend Aubrey Beardsley, who “was…this Pierrot” in Symons’s eyes, and whose tuberculosis meant that he would not live past twenty-five.¹⁶ Renowned for his exuberant dandyism, Beardsley was known to have quipped that “even my lungs are affected” in reference to his fatal ailment.¹⁷

It was, however, arguably not until the years immediately preceding the publication of Buchloh’s “Figures of Authority” that the pose practiced by Aubrey Beardsley was transformed into a method of transcending the boundaries of conventionality by Decadence’s most flamboyant progeny: glam rock. David Bowie, glam’s most intellectual acolyte, established a manifesto of sorts in stating that music should be “a parody of itself…[it should be] the clown, the Pierrot medium.”¹⁸ And in its theatrical inauthenticity it was, although its appropriation of Pierrot asked the opposite question to that of its Decadent forebears. If the likes of Willette associated Pierrot with criminality to attain distance from bourgeois conventionality, glam’s luminaries began from a position of near-criminality and found in the inauthenticity of the mask a provocative rebuke to encroaching bourgeois conventionality.

As Mark Fisher observed, glam “has a special affinity with the English suburbs,” where its luminaries grew up: “its ostentatious anti-conventionality was negatively inspired by [the suburbs’] eccentric conformism.”¹⁹ Critiquing its gender politics, Fisher also notes that glam was predominantly the “preserve of male desire,” which unwittingly elucidated the arena of glam’s “ostentatious anti-conventionality”: male sexuality, with homosexuality only decriminalized four years before glam’s explosion in 1971, and glam’s aesthetics embracing a provocative effeminacy and androgyny which flirted with a disruptive queerness.²⁰ It was, again, Bowie who made this clear. Bowie had performed as Pierrot under the tutelage of the mime artist Lindsay Kemp, with whom he had a sexual relationship. Kemp had also promoted the work of Decadent writers to him, making the Pierrot character the first Bowie assumed before raiding the dressing-up box for others throughout the 1970s.²¹

When this journey of experimentation ended in 1980, it was Bowie in the spectacularly bejeweled Pierrot costume, captured by photographer Brian Duffy in the music video for Ashes to Ashes, who announced the effacing of the singer’s first publicly recognizable character from Space Oddity—“We know Major Tom’s a junky.” Yet, under the mask of Major Tom lay the mask of Pierrot: Bowie’s putting away of childish things did not result in the throwing on of bourgeois normativity. Instead, he remained the outsider incompatible with the values of heteronormative adulthood. Significantly, pop star Steve Strange, who appeared in the Ashes to Ashes video, reprised the role of Pierrot in the early 1980s, as did Klaus Nomi, a backing singer in a televised performance of Bowie’s The Man Who Sold the World.

Journalist Simon Reynolds records that glam “drew attention to itself as a fake” in its quest to “escape from reality into a never-ending fantasy of fame and freakitude.”²² In this, Bowie’s identification of the movement with commedia is obvious. The cultural logic of commedia that Green and Swan observe is echoed by glam’s demand to reject quotidian reality to preserve its dreamworld. Reynolds, however, does not entertain the possibility that many of those who sought this dreamworld had been forbidden entry to its alternative: the suburban world of their childhoods. Evinced in the sexual politics of glam is a rerun of Pierrot’s Decadent identification with the freak. Thus, the failure of authenticity that triggered nineteenth-century coulrophobic reactions to the white visage of Pierrot during the fin-de-siecle was translated into a twentieth-century conceptual failure of authenticity under glam: what unites the two artistic circles is how this failure was reconceptualized as a critical, countercultural strength.

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Samuel Love is a PhD candidate in History of Art at the University of York. His thesis explores the carnivalesque visual culture of interwar British High Society, tracing how its engagements with baroque and Dionysian iconographies constituted a transgressive rejection of sociopolitical norms.

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Footnotes

1. Mark Dery, Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (New York: Grove, 2000), 65.

2. See Benjamin Radford, Bad Clowns (New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 2016), 21–22, for this quotation from Robert Bloch.

3. Dery, Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, 74.

4. This thesis is most comprehensively explored in: Martin Green and John Swan, The Triumph of Pierrot: The Commedia Dell'arte and the Modern Imagination (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993); Andrew McConnell Stott, “Clowns on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: Dickens, Coulrophobia, and the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 12, no. 4 (2012): 4.

5. Benjamin Buchloh, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting,” October 16 (1981): 53.

6. See Robert Storey, Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978) 121, for this quotation by Jules Chéret.

7. For an extended exploration of the evolution of glam, see Mark Dery, All The Young Dudes: Why Glam Rock Matters, Boing Boing, 2013.

8. The authoritative study remains: Storey, Pierrot, 3–93.

9. Stott, “Clowns on the Verge,” 9–11.

10. Judy Sund, “Why so Sad? Watteau's Pierrots,” The Art Bulletin 98, no. 3 (2016): 321–323.

11. Dery, Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, 77, 79.

12. Dery, Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, 119.

13. Radford, Bad Clowns, 4.

14. Arthur Symons, The Art of Aubrey Beardsley (New York: The Modern Library, 1925), 28.

15. Green and Swan, Triumph of Pierrot, xvii.

16. Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, 28.

17. David Colvin, Aubrey Beardsley: A Slave to Beauty (New York: Welcome Rain, 1998), 53.

18. Quoted in Alexander Carpenter, “‘Give a Man a Mask and He’ll Tell the Truth’: Arnold Schoenberg, David Bowie, and the Mask of Pierrot,” Intersections: Canadian Journal of Music 30, no. 2 (2011): 7.

19. Mark Fisher, “For Your Unpleasure,” in Punk Is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night (Winchester: Zero Books, 2017), 178.

20. Fisher, “For Your Unpleasure,” 178.

21. Simon Reynolds, Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy: From the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century (London: Faber and Faber, 2017), 88.

22. Reynolds, Shock and Awe, 3–5.

Performance and Imitation: Sofonisba Anguissola’s “Self Portrait with Madonna and Child”

by Emma Lazerson

Sofonisba Anguissola (1532?–1625) has been lauded as one of the most prolific portrait painters of the early modern period, but her devotional images have been largely understudied. This essay examines her Self-Portrait with Madonna and Child, a painting showcasing both Sofonisba’s style and that of other artists as a form of emulative adaptation: in her visible imitation, Sofonisba fashions herself as a courtier, while also alluding to her fitness for such a position through the embedded devotional image.

The Self-Portrait with Madonna and Child features Sofonisba gazing out at the audience, painting an image of the Madonna and Child, her brush coloring the flesh of Christ (fig. 1). The Madonna is youthful and idealized with her hand gently cupping the back of a nude Christ Child’s head, while the other delicately rests against his cheek, in preparation for a symbolic nuptial kiss. In painting the Madonna, Sofonisba inserts herself into Boccaccio’s history of illustrious women from his Concerning Famous Women (1374).¹ In his text, Boccaccio refers to women from all different stations, but he specifically describes three famous classical artists, including Thamyris, painter of the goddess Diana. She was known for her chastity and was often conflated with the Madonna in the early modern period.² It is likely that Sofonisba would have read Boccaccio’s text and may have identified with Thamyris.³ By painting the Madonna, Sofonisba places herself in dialogue with Thamyris, indicating her own longing for fame, her own desire for recognition as an artist.⁴ This desire was further exemplified by the fact that she sent such images to powerful courts throughout Europe, including that of Philip II of Spain, her future employer.⁵ Such images could have functioned as an informal sort of job interview, in which Sofonisba marketed her skills to appeal to the courts.

To aid her self-promotion, she turned to Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528) for a description of how the ideal courtier could represent herself.⁶ Castiglione’s work features an open dialogue between various members of the Gonzaga Court in Urbino, but early modern readers viewed the text as prescriptive.⁷ It is this sort of reading that likely informed Sofonisba’s self-portrayal. In her self-presentation, she goes beyond an austere self-fashioning, directly fitting into one of the ways an ideal courtier could dress according to Castiglione. Sofonisba’s expression in her self-portrait is “grave and sober,” as she wears a plain black dress with a high neckline, which respectively aligns with Castiglione’s description of an ideal courtier as she paints with the most “pleasing” color and shows the “sobriety which the Spanish nation so much observes.”⁸ She signals key characteristics that Castiglione ascribed to the ideal courtier: modesty, reservedness, diligenza, and sprezzatura—an affected appearance of ease. Her clothes are demure and without frills, and her expression is undemonstrative, indicating her modesty and reservedness. Though her expression is impassive, Sofonisba shows her propensity for labor in her partially rotated pose, steady hold on the brush and maulstick, and tense arm muscles. All are signs emblematic of the diligenza she employs in her art and, presumably, in her life. By relying on the prescriptions of Castiglione in her self-fashioning, Sofonisba presents herself as a courtier before ever working at a court, and she demonstrates her ease of assimilation in this performance as a courtier. Furthermore, her art of painting, which Castiglione esteems as a positive characteristic for a courtier, appears to be done with ease, as shown through the two modes and two styles in which she paints fluidly. In her self-portrayal, Sofonisba paints in a manner established for her other self-portraits, while in the easel painting, she employs the manners of Correggio and Parmigianino. This oscillation is also representative of an affected appearance of ease, a point to which I will return. Her self-fashioning reflects the concerns of Castiglione’s court and her own desire to adapt to such a setting.

Sofonisba portrays herself according to Castiglione’s outline, and the embedded easel painting in the Self-Portrait may further show her ability to assimilate her style to that of other artists, a capability valued in a court painter, which Michael Cole contends Sofonisba aspired to be.⁹ Assimilation acted as the mechanism by which Sofonisba would be able to become a court artist, as the Spanish sought continuity in their portraits.¹⁰ The Madonna and Child is rendered in a style different from the one she uses to portray herself and akin to that of the painters Correggio and Parmigianino. In her early career, Sofonisba would have been exposed to the style of Correggio through her teacher Bernardino Campi, and she may have seen Parmigianino’s work through the large number of prints he disseminated throughout his career.¹¹ Sofonisba’s Madonna resembles the Madonna of Correggio’s Virgin Adoring the Christ Child (fig. 2), borrowing Correggio’s soft portrayal of flesh, rosy cheeks, thick dark hair, and small softened lips. Sofonisba’s Christ Child also adopts Correggio’s blonde, fine curls visible in works such as Madonna and Child with an Angel (fig. 3). This is in contrast to the figures in her early non-devotional genre scenes, such as The Chess Game, in which her sisters are shown in a non-idealized fashion but with a naturalism characteristic of Lombard art.¹² Sofonisba’s embedded canvas alludes to Correggio, but her image is not a one-to-one copy of Corregesque style.

While Correggio’s manner is very soft, Parmigianino’s style is much sharper. The limbs of the Virgin closely parallel the long, sinuous body shape of the Madonna from Parmigianino’s Madonna of the Long Neck (fig. 4). The Christ Child is similarly composed of Parmigianino-esque features, with a thinner body and a jutting hip: this infant does not echo the pudgy children of Correggio but instead heightens the sexual nature of Parmigianino’s images. The sexualization of the pose of the Child is further carried out through the nuptial kiss shared with his mother. There is no other image in Sofonisba’s oeuvre that is so sexualized. The chosen subject matter, a nuptial kiss in which the Madonna is at once ‘sposa, madre e figlia’ to Christ as the bridegroom, is unusual for her. In sixteenth-century Italian paintings, such as those by Perugino, Raphael, and Titian, the Madonna was generally shown holding Christ, but they were not usually engaged in a kiss.¹³ In contrast, Parmigianino’s Mystic Marriage of St. Margaret features a sexual charge between the saint and Christ Child (fig. 5). In the altarpiece, St. Margaret looks longingly and kneels before the Christ Child on his mother’s lap. The infant lightly touches St. Margaret’s shoulder, and she leans close though does not directly kiss the Christ Child. This sexualized religious image was not unusual for Parmigianino, but it was for Sofonisba, who appears to adapt her subject manner and style to be more like Parmigianino’s. Sofonisba’s other devotional images, her Maria Lactans and Holy Family with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist, feature rounded and chubby-limbed infants as opposed to the Self-Portrait Christ Child’s bonier body, a common trait of Parmigianino’s infants. In sexualizing the Christ Child, Sofonisba demonstrates her stylistic range, showing her proclivity for adaptation as a form of imitation, as a means of navigating between different forms of grace.

While Sofonisba’s self-portrayal in the Self-Portrait is unornamented, the Madonna’s grace is artificial, following the conventions outlined in Agnolo Firenzuola’s 1548 treatise.¹⁴ As Elizabeth Cropper discusses in her article on Parmigianino’s paintings, Firenzuola defined ideal female beauty in specific terms, equating the perfect silhouette with that of a capital.¹⁵ As the tenets put forth by Firenzuola were perhaps inspired by Parmigianino’s Madonna of the Long Neck, or vice-versa, there is a capital in the Parmigianino painting, echoing the beauty of Parmigianino’s perfected Madonna. Like Parmigianino, Sofonisba, too, includes a capital next to the Madonna in her Self-Portrait, presumably as an analog for the Madonna’s beauty. The capital’s inclusion acts as a purposeful allusion to the kind of grace promulgated and articulated by Parmigianino and Correggio, as opposed to the less idealized grace of Sofonisba’s own style.¹⁶ Her easy navigation between the two distinct types of grace is a kind of performance, for which Castiglione coined a term in his Book of the Courtier: sprezzatura.¹⁷

Sofonisba’s self-fashioning as a courtier is a kind of affected performance, but the canvas within the self-portrait can be considered a performance in its own right. Sofonisba not only thinks about the appearance of courtly manners but also about Correggio and Parmigianino’s type of invention. Her imitation is conspicuous, performative. Moreover, the oscillation between styles and inventions heightens the appearance of sprezzatura. As the imitation is visible, the negotiation between her own style and Correggio’s and Parmigianino’s becomes part of the painting’s mission. Sofonisba was not just considering Castiglione’s text as a prescriptive manual for the courtier: she was engaging with and interpreting the text, identifying ways to make her own form of sprezzatura recognizable in her work. I contend that through her emulative adaptation, the demonstration of her ability to assimilate to the style of others, Sofonisba gained a position at the court of Philip II. However, there are still many unanswered questions regarding this work and others like it: What other forms of imitation did Sofonisba practice? How do her devotional images reshape the artist’s oeuvre, including those which are now lost? These questions, among others, provide future avenues of scholarship surrounding this standout Renaissance artist: here’s looking at her.¹⁸

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Emma Lazerson received her BA from Emory University in 2022 and is currently a first-year MA candidate in Art History at Case Western Reserve University. Her research focuses on early modern Italian female artists, contextualizing their practices in social, religious, and global theories.

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Footnotes

1. Michael Cole, Sofonisba’s Lesson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 22.

2. For an example of this conflation, see MS Français 598, De Mulieribus Claris, Bibliothèque National de France, 1403, Paris.

3. Cole, Sofonisba’s Lesson, 22–25.

4. Cole, Sofonisba’s Lesson, 21.

5. Cole, Sofonisba’s Lesson, 21.

6. Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 201.

7. Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture, 15–17.

8. “I prefer [the courtier] always [in dress] to tend a little more toward the grave and sober rather than the foppish. Hence, I think that black is more pleasing in clothing than any other color; and if not black, then at least some color on the dark side…I would have our Courtier’s dress show that sobriety which the Spanish nation so much observes, since external things often bear witness to inner things.” Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), 89.

9. There has been little scholarship directly relating to Sofonisba’s imitation. See Maria H. Loh, “New and Improved: Repetition as Originality in Italian Baroque Practice and Theory,” The Art Bulletin 86, no. 3 (2004): 477–504. Loh discusses both the early modern notion of misto, or mixing other styles into one composition. For a discussion of the Spanish interest in copying practices among their court artists, see Cole, Sofonisba’s Lesson, 137.

10. Cole, Sofonisba’s Lesson, 21.

11. See Ilya Sandra Perlingieri, The First Great Woman Artist of the Renaissance (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), 40–41, regarding Sofonisba’s introduction to Correggio’s style.

12. See Andrea Bayer, ed., Painters of Reality: The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

13. In the Middle Ages, Christ and the Madonna as bridegroom and bride was a common theme. In these medieval examples the two actors were usually represented as close in age, rather than as a mother and child, an allegorized union for the church. For examples of the nuptial kiss, see Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, “Art of the Misbegotten: Physicality and the Divine in Renaissance Images,” Artibus et Historiae 30, no. 60 (2009): 225–232.

14. Elizabeth Cropper, “On Beautiful Women, Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the Vernacular Style,” The Art Bulletin 58, no. 3 (September 1976): 381–383. Also see Agnolo Firenzuola, On the Beauty of Women, trans. Konrad Eisenbichler and Jacqueline Murray (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).

15. Cropper, “On Beautiful Women,” 381.

16. Regina Stefaniak, “Amazing Grace: Parmigianino’s ‘Vision of Saint Jerome’,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 58, no. 1 (1995): 105–115.

17. “...practice in all things a certain sprezzautra, so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it. And I believe much grace comes of this: because everyone knows the difficulty of things that are rare and well done; wherefore facility in such things causes the greatest wonder.” Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 32.

18. Here I reference the titles of Perlingieri’s book and Mary Garrard’s “Here’s Looking at Me: Sofonisba Anguissola and the Problem of the Woman Artist,” Renaissance Quarterly 47, no. 3 (Autumn 1994): 556–622. These authors were some of the first modern scholars to write about Sofonisba. This essay is indebted to their contributions.

A Fledgling Baroque: Featherworks from New Spain in Counter-Reformation Europe

by Rachel Kline

Throughout the sixteenth century, Spanish clergy and nobility acquired hundreds of featherworks crafted by the Indigenous artists of New Spain, which arrived on merchant ships in major European port cities from Antwerp to Seville. The artistic tradition of featherwork, or amantecayotl, among the Mexica people of New Spain predated the conquest of Tenochtitlán but was preserved by the Spanish colonists who commissioned Indigenous artists to create Catholic images in the art form. At once objects of Mexica cultural affirmation and evidence of conquest and conversion, sixteenth-century featherworks represented the Spanish possession of the Americas and bridged the impossible distance of empire for collectors who sought to construct a cosmopolitan self-image. European viewers were enthralled by their inexplicability as objects of both human artifice and natural creation so distinct from the mimetic painting of the late Renaissance. Within the context of the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent’s (1545–1563) reaffirmation of the role of images in religious practice, featherworks emerge as a non-western influence on the European Baroque, which harnessed the political valence of affect in service of the Catholic Church. By examining Mexican featherworks through a decolonial lens, this paper proposes a thread linking the affective splendor of arts indigenous to the Central Mexican Valley to the emergent Baroque style of Counter-Reformation Europe.

One of the earliest featherworks to arrive in Europe was the pre-Hispanic Ahuitzotl Shield, now in the imperial collections in Vienna (fig. 1).¹ Dating to the early sixteenth century, the featherwork shield was crafted by skilled artists known as amantecas, who were trained in the art of amantecayotl. Called chimalli by the Mexica, these featherwork shields were often used in ritual performances and were particularly valued for the ways in which the image crafted from feathers responded to the vibrant effects of ambient light, granting them an affective power.² Often received as tribute to the Aztec Emperor, or tlatoani, extravagantly decorated featherwork shields can also be read as material manifestations of the tlatoani’s authority to extract luxury resources from subordinate groups.³ The amantecas created these featherwork objects by cutting feathers into minuscule pieces and applying them to a blank surface with a natural adhesive in a similar technique to arranging mosaics.⁴ The feathers themselves were acquired by the pochtecas who traveled far distances into Central America to obtain them from the quetzal bird and other species not native to the Central Mexican Valley.⁵ As a result, featherwork objects, or amantecayotl, embodied the reach of the Aztec Empire, which wielded economic and political power over neighboring regions from which the feathers originated. The function of featherworks as an imperial signifier for the Aztecs would later be appropriated by the Spanish conquistadores who sought to convey their own imperial aspirations.

Beginning in the sixteenth century, Indigenous artists were commissioned by the Spanish clergy and colonial elites to depict Catholic imagery using the featherwork medium, thereby resulting in the creation of complex objects situated between different cultural systems of representation. While featherworks bearing religious imagery have commonly been interpreted as signs of European domination of the Mexica, the Spanish appropriation of a traditional indigenous medium for their most sacred works of devotional art speaks to a more nuanced relationship of power.⁶ In this reading of the featherworks, we can identify a system of artistic representation and symbolic meaning which would not be completely erased even in the face of Spanish conquest and conversion. Although the Spaniards chose to preserve the medium of featherwork and appropriate it for their own devotional arts, we can consider the skillfulness of Indigenous artists, the adaptability of Catholic images, and the dual coding of indigenous and European meaning as primary reasons why featherwork endured.⁷

The reception of featherworks from New Spain in Europe determined the impact they would have on the artistic practice and discourse of the Counter-Reformation as an era of stylistic transformation. The bewilderment that ensued upon the arrival of featherworks highlights the intensity of responses that these objects elicited.⁸ Created in Michoacán by the Indigenous artist Juan Batista Cuiris at the end of the sixteenth century, the featherwork pendants Jesus at the Age of Twelve (fig. 2) and Weeping Virgin (fig. 3) embody the astonishing optical effects that fascinated European viewers. Both figures are encircled by a shimmering turquoise background of hummingbird feathers, which appear both blue and green due to the effect of light on the surface of the feather fragments.⁹ The sacred quality of these images is indebted to the medium, which, through the chromatic vibrations of hummingbird feathers, breathes life into the figures of the Virgin and Christ. Building on Brendan McMahon’s argument that the “chromatic instability of colonial Mexican featherwork” transformed the visual experience of images in early modern Europe, we should reconsider their reception in the context of European stylistic developments.¹⁰ The green and blue hues of iridescent featherwork shift and change depending on the angle of both the viewer and the light source, and therefore they became enmeshed in artistic discourse about the affective capabilities of visual experience.¹¹ In this way, featherwork images differed from the static medium of oil paint and entered into the vibrant debates surrounding the artistic imitation of nature and the wonders of the natural world. As such, the bewilderment of European viewers upon seeing Mexican featherworks can be explained not just by the objects’ embodiment of an exotic location, but by their connection to an intellectual discourse about “the illusory nature of the material world itself.”¹²

These decolonial reconsiderations about the reception of featherworks in early modern Europe share a concern for both the agency of the Indigenous artist whose skillful work captivated European audiences and the contributions of Latin America to intellectual discourse and artistic production across sixteenth-century Europe. The canon of early modern art should include objects like Batista Cuiris’s featherworks because of documented evidence that they were considered sophisticated art objects even by European artists themselves. In 1520, the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer traveled to Brussels to meet with Emperor Charles V regarding his pension. While in Brussels, Dürer saw the exhibition of Cortés’s gifts to Charles V, which included a large inventory of Aztec metalwork, textiles, and most likely featherwork.¹³ Upon viewing these objects, Dürer recorded in his journal: “I have never in my life seen anything that gave my heart such delight as these things for I saw in them the subtle ingeniousness of people in foreign lands. I cannot find words to describe all those things I found there.”¹⁴

This encounter between a Renaissance master and Aztec art is remarkable in and of itself, but the most significant aspect of Dürer’s testimony is his ascription of ingenium to the Indigenous artists of New Spain. Ingenium, or the innate quality of genius, was an early modern term attributed only to the most skilled painters, sculptors, and architects. Dürer’s inclusion of this terminology in his journal as he recalled the objects he saw that day demonstrates the affective power of New Spanish arts in the European imagination. Far from being described as exotic or primitive, the objects Cortés shipped back to the Holy Roman Empire were lauded as objects crafted by artists gifted with ingenium. However, it should be noted that while Dürer’s claim demonstrates that he perceived the makers of these objects quite differently than the dehumanizing conquistadores, it remains unclear how he viewed Indigenous artists in relation to himself, as the Aztec objects he witnessed may have fallen outside the bounds of a Renaissance definition of art, which privileged painting, sculpture, and graphic works.

Though Dürer’s Wing of a Blue Roller predates his trip to Brussels, it becomes impossible to view without imagining the influence of Aztec featherworks on the artist’s detailed description of the miraculously vibrant bird wing (fig. 4). Although there is no explicit evidence that Dürer ever drew the marvelous featherworks from New Spain that he experienced in Brussels, unpacking the social life of his Wing of a Blue Roller points to a likely linkage between the two art forms.¹⁵ Regardless, the interest in and relationship between featherworks and the hyper-realism of Dürer’s nature study helps us to imagine the ways in which arts from New Spain entered and impacted the intellectual discourse surrounding European art during the sixteenth century.

Wing of a Blue Roller was acquired by Emperor Rudolf II to be displayed in his Kunstkammer at Prague Castle, which also housed Juan Batista Cuiris’s featherwork pendants of the Virgin and Christ.¹⁶ As a great patron of the arts and sciences, Rudolf II was intensely interested in natural curiosities and what Brendan McMahon has described as contingent images, or “ambiguous pictures with unstable perception.”¹⁷ We can theorize that Rudolf paired Bautista Cuiris’s featherworks with Dürer’s watercolor not only because of their associations with birds, but also because they would have provoked humanistic discourse surrounding the capacity for art to imitate or even surpass nature.

The Kunstkammer of Rudolf II was organized into the dual categories of artificialia and naturalia, with man-made objects and items collected from nature being cataloged separately but not necessarily displayed in this manner.¹⁸ However, the featherwork’s natural medium, combined with human intellectual talent, disrupts the binary of Rudolf’s system of classification and therefore represents an object of exceptional curiosity. The natural medium of hummingbird feathers would have been understood by European viewers as secondary to the featherworks’ function as devotional works of art. Further, the astonishing optical effects of Bautista Cuiris’s featherworks could make even the hyper-naturalistic watercolor by Dürer appear mute and static. The hummingbird feathers’ chromatic instability combined with the breathtaking arrangement of color would have perhaps appealed more to Rudolf II who, in prefiguring the Baroque emphasis on the spectacular, was himself captivated by the wondrous things the world had to offer. Unlike the Renaissance, in which the most mesmerizing art was that which could imitate the ancients, the Counter-Reformation era ushered in a focus on affective, bewildering images that existed beyond the realm of intellectual or artistic explanation.

Isabel Yaya has demonstrated the desire amongst collectors to possess marvelous objects from the Americas and maintains that during the Counter-Reformation, “there was also a turning away from the classical standards of beauty towards an emphasis on the atypical work of nature and the abnormal.”¹⁹ The practice of collecting objects of exotica in the late sixteenth century aligned with the humanistic pursuit of compiling the macrocosm of the world within the microcosm of the Kunstkammer, yet also implicated the European elite in the process of American colonization.²⁰ While featherworks indeed embodied the far-flung colony of New Spain, they also promoted the growing interest among collectors and connoisseurs in the marvelous, which would ultimately lead to the stylistic shift towards the spectacular image in the Baroque era.

In reaffirming the centrality of images to Catholic worship, the Council of Trent in 1563 and the later Counter-Reformation movement introduced the political valence of affect.²¹ Indeed, an entire genre of art rooted in the promotion of the sensuous as inherent to the practice of worship arose following the Council of Trent.²² The responses of bewilderment that followed the introduction of featherworks into Europe predate the profoundly sensuous devotional images of the Counter-Reformation, yet their reception by Dürer speaks to a longstanding impact. Claire Farago has theorized about the significant contributions of Latin American art to the intellectual landscape of Counter-Reformation Europe and argues that “non-European art may have contributed to the theoretical and critical discussions of western art, which never directly mentioned their existence.”²³ Through documentary and visual evidence, the proposed thread linking featherworks to the emergent Baroque style of the Counter-Reformation has amplified the influence of Latin America and Indigenous artists on the stylistic transformation of European art.

Within the context of the Counter-Reformation, featherworks illustrated the power of spectacular images to captivate the viewer, as Europeans remarked upon the mesmerizing inexplicability of featherworks as objects of human artifice and marvels of the natural world. Predating the European Baroque movement by more than fifty years, featherworks breathed new life into the artistic and intellectual discourses surrounding the role of the image and the wonders of nature. Through this artistic influence, perhaps featherworks can be situated within an emergent Baroque aesthetic, which valued the marvelous, sensuous qualities so inherent to the affective capabilities of featherworks. Therefore, by crediting the Indigenous makers of featherworks as contributors to a period of European stylistic transformation, this paper has sought to reaffirm the active role of Indigenous Americans in the making and remaking of the visual culture of the early modern world.

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Rachel Kline is a third-year PhD student in the History of Art & Architecture at Boston University specializing in the Italian Renaissance. With a background in anthropology, she hopes to use this perspective to explore the cultural meanings acquired by art objects and their materials circulating in the Renaissance. Rachel is especially interested in the artistic exchange between Italy and Northern Europe during the fifteenth century.

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Footnotes

1. The shield was given by Hernán Cortés to the Bishop of Palencia, Don Pedro Ruiz de la Mota in his shipment sent from New Spain in 1522. Alessandra Russo, The Untranslatable Image: A Mestizo History of the Arts in New Spain, 1500–1600 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 28.

2. Alessandra Russo has suggested that for the Mexica people prior to Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century, featherworks were linked to the religious practice of sacrifice and the accompanying ritual performances. Alessandra Russo, “Recomposing the Image: Presents and Absents in the Mass of St. Gregory, Mexico-Tenochtitlan, 1539,” in Synergies: Creating Art in Joined Culture, eds. Manuela De Giorgi, Annette Hoffmann, Nicola Suthor (Florence: Kunsthistorisches Institut-Max Planck, 2012), 467. Additionally, Diane Fane has argued that the ways in which light and color interacted on the surface of the featherwork medium granted the chimalli an affective power. Diana Fane, “Feathers, Jade, Turquoise, and Gold,” in Images Take Flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe (1400–1700), eds. Alessandra Russo, Gerhard Wolf, and Diane Fane (Munich: Hirmer, 2015), 103.

3.  See Alessandra Russo, "Cortes's Objects and the Idea of New Spain: Inventories as Spatial Narratives," Journal of the History of Collections 23, no. 2 (2011): 18.

4. Alessandra Russo, “A Contemporary Art from New Spain,” in Images Take Flight, 30. 

5. The pochtecas were a class of long-distance merchants in pre-Hispanic Tenochtitlán who traveled as far as the southwestern United States and Central America to acquire precious goods for the imperial capital. See Deborah L. Nichols, “Farm to Market in the Aztec Imperial Economy,” in Rethinking the Aztec Economy, eds. Deborah L. Nichols, Frances F. Berdan, and Michael Ernst (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017), 19–43.

6. Thomas Cummins has argued that featherworks depicting Catholic subject matter were primarily evidence of successful conversion of the Mexica by the Spanish. In reference to one of the first featherworks to be made with Catholic imagery, he maintains that “the feather painting of the Mass of Saint Gregory was thus intended as more than a material gift; it was an early sign of the conversion of the Mexicans, and proof that they were capable of a profound understanding of the mysteries of Christianity.” See Thomas Cummins, “To Serve Man: Pre-Columbian Art, Western Discourses of Idolatry, and Cannibalism,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 42 (2002): 116.

7. In Reframing the Renaissance, Claire Farago calls for a methodological approach to Renaissance art which considers the exterior factors of artistic influence and asks, “What would the history of the Renaissance look like if cultural interaction and exchange, and the conditions of reception, became our primary concern?” This type of decolonial methodology that aims to re-examine the visual culture of the Renaissance has informed my approach to the reception of featherworks in Counter-Reformation Europe. Claire J. Farago, “Introduction,” in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650, ed. Claire Farago (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 8.

8. At the Debate of Valladolid (1550–1551), Bartolomé de Las Casas argued in support of the humanity of Indigenous Americans by citing their artistic capabilities. Las Casas articulated how the bewildering effect of featherworks convinced him of the rights of the Indigenous to sovereignty and even placed featherworks on the same level as contemporary European painting. In his Apologética Historia Sumaria he wrote: "But what certainly seems to exceed all human inventiveness, and which all the nations of the world will find not just curious but entirely novel, and all the more worthy of admiration and esteem, is the art that those Mexican people know how to make so perfectly, of creating with natural feathers with their own natural colors everything that they and all other excellent and first-rate painters are capable of painting with brushes." Bartolomé de Las Casas, Apologética Historia Sumaria, book III, LXII, 323–325, qtd. in Alessandra Russo, The Untranslatable Image, 85.

9. Feathers from the violetear hummingbird were increasingly used in featherworks postconquest because the species of bird was native to Mexico and the Spanish conquest had disrupted previous long-distance trade networks which imported feathers to Tenochtitlán from the rainforests of Central America. See Brendan C. McMahon, "Contingent Images: Looking Obliquely at Colonial Mexican Featherwork in Early Modern Europe," The Art Bulletin 103, no. 2 (2021): 29.

10. Brendan C. McMahon, "Contingent Images: Looking Obliquely at Colonial Mexican Featherwork in Early Modern Europe," The Art Bulletin 103, no. 2 (2021): 26.

11. McMahon, Contingent Images, 25.

12. McMahon, Contingent Images, 45.

13. Joseph Koerner, “Dürer in Motion,” in Dürer’s Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist, eds. Susan Foister and Peter Brink (London: National Gallery, 2021), 44.

14. Albrecht Dürer qtd. in Koerner, “Dürer in Motion,” 44.

15. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has demonstrated that objects collect value and social meaning through human transactions. See Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–63. Alessandra Russo has argued that Dürer, who was intensely interested in nature studies as a way of obtaining knowledge, possibly created this watercolor in dialogue with the objects of Aztec art he saw in Brussels. See Alessandra Russo, “A Contemporary Art from New Spain,” 50.

16. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “Remarks on the Collections of Rudolf II: The Kunstkammer as a Form of Representatio.” Art Journal 38, no. 1 (1978): 22–28; Alessandra Russo, “A Contemporary Art from New Spain,” 50.

17. McMahon, Contingent Images, 26.

18. DaCosta Kaufmann, “Remarks on the Collections of Rudolf II,” 24.

19. Isabel Yaya, “Wonders of America: The Curiosity Cabinet as a Site of Representation and Knowledge.” Journal of the History of Collections 20, no. 2 (November 1, 2008): 176.

20. Daniela Bleichmar, "Seeing the World in a Room: Looking at Exotica in Early Modern Collections," in Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, eds. Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C. Mancall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 15–30.

21. Between 1545 and 1563, the Council of Trent reevaluated the role of images in the Catholic Church in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, which had led to an outbreak of iconoclasm in Northern Europe. The Council of Trent resulted in the recognition by the Catholic Church that Protestants had renounced emotion and the senses in their practice of worship and so the Church could therefore use images that elicited an emotional response to appeal to followers lost to the Protestant movement. See Marcia B. Hall and Tracy Elizabeth Cooper, “Introduction,” in The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church, eds. Marcia B. Hall and Tracy Elizabeth Cooper (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 2.

22. Hall and Cooper, “Introduction,” 2.

23. Farago, “Introduction,” 11.