European artists produced little to compare with the sophisticated featherwork found elsewhere in the world. Albrecht Dürer famously expressed amazement at the feather shields and other Aztec artefacts he saw at the court of emperor Charles V in the early sixteenth century. Yet working with feathers was not foreign to artists like Dürer. This lecture begins by addressing the essential role of feathers as tools in early modern Europe, drawing on sources ranging from craft manuals to depictions of studio practice. The second half of the talk turns to the ways that artists’ close engagement with feathers and their avian makers inflected the representation of birds themselves—from paintings of the Annunciation to imagined menageries. The feather’s rich range of associations in European art and thought is a history that has yet to be written.

Marisa Anne Bass is a historian of early modern art whose research explores intersections between creative and intellectual culture, particularly in northern Europe. At present, she is Professor in the History of Art and Chair of Early Modern Studies at Yale University. Her most recent monograph The Monument’s End: Public Art and the Modern Republic was published last fall with Princeton University Press. Her other books include Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt, winner of the Roland H. Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society, and Conchophilia: Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe. In 2021, she received the inaugural Guggenheim Fellowship in Early Modern Studies, and this summer, she will be the Panofsky Professor at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. Her current projects include a book in progress titled Flights: A History of Birds in Art.