Figure 1. Yacatecuhtli (Florentine Codex, chapter 19, fol. 17r).
In his General History of the Things of New Spain, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1500–90) describes a feathered shield with a fret design at the centre, an attribute, apparently, of Yacatecuhtli, god of traders (Figure 1).1 This design matches those of a pair of feathered shields held in the Landesmuseum of Württemberg, Germany (Figures 2 and 3). How did they get there? What did Germans make of them?
What do we know about the ancient Mexican feathered shields? Sources from the 16th century show Aztecs with plain warrior shields for combat, gala shields for feasts or dances and other shields exhibiting the insignia of the supreme war chief. The Codex Mendoza, for example, suggests the xicalcoliuhqui fret ornament shield was for warriors who had captured more than five prisoners and distinguished themselves in battle. Other depictions of the shield are found in the Historia natural de las Indias of Diego Durán (Figure 4). These help us understand the various uses of the xicalcoliuhqui shield before the Spanish conquest.
Both shields held in the Landesmuseum Württemberg were made before the Spaniards reached Tenochtitlan, the imperial city of the Mexica or Aztecs, and conquered it two years later, in 1521. Once he reached Veracruz in 1519, Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) shipped back to Emperor Charles V objects made of jade and silver and richly decorated shields and featherwork as tribute to the Spanish crown. Understood as ‘political gifts’, these artefacts helped justify his aims and claims. In addition, war artefacts were esteemed as precious spoils of conquest or as signs of loyal submission. Charles V displayed the precious objects sent by Cortés when celebrating his coronation as Holy Roman emperor in Brussels in 1520. The precious artefacts stirred awe and curiosity among humanist scholars and artists, such as Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), who had attended the coronation. Dürer recounts that he was left speechless before ‘wonderful things made with great artistry’ in the ‘golden chamber of the town hall’.2 There he ‘wondered about the subtle inventiveness of the people of foreign lands’ who had made them.
Figures 2 and 3. Feathered shields, Aztec, c.1520 (Inv. [E 1402] Friedrich I of Württemberg (1557–1608); courtesy of Landesmuseum Württemberg, Germany).
It is unclear if the feathered shields in the Landesmuseum were among the items shipped by Cortés to the Holy Roman emperor and king of Spain. Notably, the museum label displayed at the entrance of the exhibition room where both shields are held presents neither de Sahagún’s description of them nor any other 16th-century Mexican source. Instead, the visitor is presented with the account of the diplomat and art collector Philipp Hainhofer (1578–1647). Hainhofer had visited the courtly collection of Duke Friedrich I of Württemberg (reg. 1593–1608) in 1616. The account includes the following excerpt:
The chamberlain led me into the tower and opened two rooms, inside were two Indian armours, drinking utensils, snails, shells, giant legs, a whole human skin … The head of a unicorn, ostrich eggs, turtles, crocodiles, fish and different animals hanging high up in the air … In summa, there are so many beautiful things on top of each other that it took a long time to see everything.3
Figure 5. Unknown artist, Triumphal Entry of America, 29.9 × 55.5 cm (Klassik Stiftung Weimarer/Graphische Sammlung, KK207).
Hainhofer’s description of his experience in the Duke’s Wunderkammer was typical of the age, when collecting was less about systematic classification and more about assembling a trophy chest of curiosities and wonders. As was common during the period, the duke did not hesitate to display and in some cases gift his treasures to further his diplomatic relations with courts and gentleman scholars. Most notably, the duke decided to parade his feathered shields in tournament dramatisations of ‘the triumphal entry of America’ (Figure 5).
The performative insertion by the duke of the actual shields in a performance likely based upon the Protestant engraving entitled Quae pompa delecta ad Regem deferatur, published by Theodor de Bry in 1591 (Figure 6), adds a vital element of authenticity otherwise lacking in de Bry’s fanciful image.4 Here the shields take their place in a symbolic act of Protestant religious war.
In his chronicle Beschreibung deß Fürstlichen Apparatus, Königlichen Auffzugs/Heroischen Ingressus und herrlicher Pomp und Solennitet, Jakob Frischlin relates how at the Stuttgart Castle the personification of America made her way towards Protestant Duke Friedrich, in the hope that he would release her from Spanish Catholic subjugation.
The chronicle tells us that members of the court dressed in elaborate costumes and carried the feathered shields when performing the triumphant entry of ‘Queen America’. Dressed in feathers, Queen America gathered together with her sisters, Europa, Asia and Africa. All came expressly to visit and praise Duke Friedrich I in Germany: ‘Und wolt jetzt auch ins Teutschelandt/ Daselbsten ein Fürst Hochgeborn/ Zu aller Tugent außerkohrn/ Fridrich so wirdt sein Nahm genandt/ Hertzog von Würtenberger Landt.’5
It is likely that the shield was simultaneously intended to evoke in the spectator’s mind the image of Aeneas’s shield and in so doing presage the glory of the ruling house. The shield made for Aeneas had presaged Rome’s future, and it contained propaganda for the Emperor Augustus. It is not by chance that Duke Friedrich I also decided to integrate Daniel’s biblical prophecy into the performance through the allegorical personifications of antiquity’s universal rulers: Nimrod (Babylon), Cyrus (Persia), Alexander the Great (Greece) and Julius Caesar (Rome). These Old Testament biblical rulers now paid homage to America. Daniel’s prophecy was the basis of the ‘Four World Monarchies’ scheme that had dominated European periodisation and prophecy about the rise and fall of world empires. The Four Monarchies model, as a theological interpretation of history, conceded that powerful earthly kingdoms that fell in moral decay should be replaced by the kingdom of God. This eschatological reading of history was widely deployed by Protestant electoral princes against the Holy Roman emperor’s universal imperium, and indeed this reading informs the drawings of de Bry and our unknown artist. This princely discourse promoted a new territorial and Christian order, where the ambitio regnandi of the Catholic rulers would not only be morally admonished but replaced (as Queen America demands from Duke Friedrich I) with good government and true religion under Protestant rule.
The Protestant deployment of the shields reminds us that collections are far from innocent or static assemblages of dead objects with fixed meanings. And that is why the two shields are still held in a museum in Germany.
Figure 6. De Bry, Quae pompa delecta ad regem deferatur (1591).
FURTHER READING
Bujok, E. (2004) Neue Welten in europäischen Sammlungen: Africana und Americana in Kunstkammern bis 1670 (Berlin: Reimer).
Fane, D., A. Russo, and G. Wolf (eds.) (2015) Images Take flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe 1400–1700 (Munich: Hirmer).
Feest, C. (1990) ‘Vienna’s Mexican treasures: Aztec, Mixtec and Tarascan works from 16th-century American collections’, Archiv für Völkerkunde, vol. 45, 1–64.
Frischlin, M.J. (1602) Beschreibung deß Fürstlichen Apparatus, Königlichen Auffzugs/Heroischen Ingressus und herrlicher Pomp und Solennitet (Frankfurt am Main).
Landesmuseum Wurttemberg (2017) Die Kunstkammer der Herzöge von Württemberg: Bestand, Geschichte, Kontext, 3 vols. (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke Verlag).
Mulryne, J.R., H. Watanabe-O’Kelly, and M. Shewring (eds.) (2004) Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate).
Nutall, Z. (1892) On Ancient Mexican Shields: an Essay (Leiden: P.W.M. Trap).
de Sahagún, B. (1961) Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain [1577] (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research and the University of Utah).
1 Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of The Things of New Spain, ed. by Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1961), lib. 1, p. 44.
2 Albrecht Dürer, Tagebuch der Reise in die Niederlande, in Dürer Schriftlicher Nachlass, ed. by Hans Rupprich (Berlin Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1956), vol. 1, 154.
3 Letter from Hainhofer to Duke Philipp II von Pommern-Stettin, 1616, https://blog.landesmuseum-stuttgart.de/wieder-wunder-in-der-kunst-und-wunderkammer/
4 Brevis narratio eorvm qvae in Florida Americae provincia Gallis acciderunt, secunda in illa nauigatione, duce Renato de Laudonniere classis praefecto (Wecheli sumtibus vero T. de Bry, venales reperiutur in officina S. Feirabedii, 1591), plate 37.
5 J. Frischlin, Beschreibung deß Fürstlichen Apparatus, Königlichen Auffzugs/Heroischen Ingressus und herrlicher Pomp und Solennitet (Frankfurt am Main, 1602) 130.