Alessandra Russo, Gerhard Wolf, Diana Fane et al: 'Images Ta...

Hammer

£95

Alessandra Russo, Gerhard Wolf, Diana Fane et al: 'Images Take Flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe 1400-1700', Munich, Hirmer, [2015], 1st edition, 480pp, profusely colour illustrated throughout, 4to, original cloth gilt, dust wrapper. A scholarly and visually magnificent multi-authored work that reveals how feathers, birds, and images of flight became defining signifiers within art, thinking, and history during the geographical expansion of Europe into the Americas from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Among the Prehispanic Mexica (commonly known as the Aztec), representations of feathers were ubiquitous in pictorial and sculptural art to indicate hybrid beings or conceptual ideas. The Mexica also had feather artists, known as amantecas in Nahuatl, who used actual feathers in complex visual compositions on shields, headdresses, or clothing. These Pre-Columbian feather mosaics, and ones the Mexica amantecas continued to make into the eighteenth century, were the catalyst for a changing view of feathers, flight, and representation, and they are the central, recurring focus of the entire book. Scarce