Art of the Americas: Colonial and Early Republic Eras mod 9 done

British Colonies and the Early Republic

Early Republic

• Gilbert Stuart's Lansdowne Portrait
  • Gilbert Stuart may not be a well-known name, but almost every American is familiar with his portrait of George Washington.
  • The Athenaeum Portrait is the engraved image of George Washington on the front of the one-dollar bill.
  • Stuart painted dozens of portraits of George Washington.
  • Another full-length portrait is called the Lansdowne Portrait.
  • While not as famous as the Athenaeum Portrait, the Lansdowne Portrait holds special significance in American art history.

Featherworks

• Featherworks were highly prized objects in the early post-Conquest period.
• Hernan Cortes sent feathered objects to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to impress him.
• Diego de Soto carried featherworks from New Spain to Spain as gifts for Charles V.
• Many featherworks were collected in cabinets of curiosities throughout Europe, symbolizing the exotic "New World."
• Feathered goods, like the Headdress of Moctezuma, are prized possessions in European museums.
• Indigenous groups used feathers to adorn luxury goods, clothing, and for ceremonies.
• The Mexica (Aztecs) prized feathers acquired through long-distance trade.
  • The most prized feathers were those of the resplendent quetzal from Guatemala.
  • Hummingbirds, macaws, and other birds supplied feathers.
• The Mexica collected feathers as tribute from conquered areas.
• Tribute lists in the Codex Mendoza show the large number of birds and feathers sent to the Aztec capital city, Tenochtitlan.
• In Tenochtitlan, featherworkers (amanteca) had their own special social class and lived in a neighborhood called Amantla.
  • The Codex Mendoza records feathers paid as tribute, including:
    • "four pieces of rich feathers, made like handfuls into this form,"
    • "eight thousand little handfuls of rich turquoise feathers,"
    • "eight thousand little handfuls of rich red feathers,"
    • "eight thousand little handfuls of rich green feathers."

Indigenous Knowledge and the Impact of Disease

• The population of the Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara) has risen to around 15,000 citizens on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota.
• Understanding the history of pandemic and loss provides a lens to see artworks from the upper Missouri River region.
• The scarcity of existing objects creates challenges in making specific attributions and comparisons from this region and time.
• Defining features of northern plains groups at the time of contact formed as a response to disease and the resulting loss of life.
• Social fluidity, where tribes split apart and regrouped, may have developed as a means of coping with catastrophic population loss.
• Epidemics affected all aspects of life, including warriors' training and military technology development.
• Men's shirts, worn by warriors in battle or during festivals, were decorated with hair fringes, ermine tails, quillwork, and beadwork.
• Assigning attribution to a particular community is difficult due to the scarcity of pre-1850 arts by Indigenous artists in U.S. museums.
• Some collections exist in international museums, such as the Paul Kane collection in the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg and the collections of Prince Maximiliam of Wied in museums located in Berne, Berlin, and Stuttgart.
• Some collections exist from Lewis and Clark's expedition from 1804-1806, but William Clark's personal collection went missing around 1838.
• The total number of works of American Indian arts from the Plains before 1850 remains quite small.

A Clash of Traditions

• In 1539, Diego de Alvarado Huanitzin, a Nahua noble and governor of Mexico City, commissioned a featherwork for Pope Paul III showing the Mass of St. Gregory.
• Diego de Alvarado Huanitzin was nephew and son-in-law to Moctezuma II, the last Aztec ruler before Spanish colonial rule began in 1521.
• The artwork is made of bird feathers attached to a wood panel.
• It is the oldest surviving featherwork from colonial Mexico and was made by an Indigenous man for the Pope.
• Two years before its creation, Pope Paul III issued the bull Sublimus Dei, decreeing Amerindian peoples to be rational human beings with souls and calling for an end to their enslavement.
• The subject of the Mass of St. Gregory was popular due to its focus on transubstantiation.
  • Transubstantiation is the belief that the bread and wine transform into the body and blood of Christ during Mass.
• Saint Gregory, a 6th-century pope, experienced a miraculous vision of Christ on the altar during Mass, proving that the bread literally became Christ's body when consecrated.
  • Christ appeared to Saint Gregory as the Man of Sorrows, with his wounds displayed.
• The featherwork production was likely supervised by Franciscan missionary Pedro de Gante, who trained Indigenous men in European artistic conventions and techniques.
• Prints were often supplied as models for these Christian neophytes.
• The featherwork represents the clash of different worlds, with Mesoamerican technique and European/Christian subject matter.

Interpreting Shirts from the Upper Missouri Region

• In December 2019, the Denver Art Museum (DAM) received two shirts from the Upper Missouri region as gifts from a private collector.
  • One shirt dates to around 1800-20, and the other to around 1855.
• The earlier shirt (1800-1820) is considered the most significant work to enter DAM's Native arts collection in decades.
• It is exceedingly rare and among the earliest shirts from the Upper Missouri River region in existence.
• The shirt's lack of beadwork, minimal use of Bayetta trade wool, and quilled design elements point to its early creation date and connection to this region.