Making Featherwork in Early Modern Europe

Production, Consumption, and Affective Regimes in Renaissance Venice

3. Making Featherwork in Early Modern Europe

Stefan Hanß

Abstract

This chapter charts the unknown history of early modern European featherworking and its relationship with the world of matter and making. Focusing on feather-workers’ activities in Antwerp, Brussels, Dresden, Leipzig, London, Madrid, Milan, Nuremberg, Paris, Prague, Stuttgart, Turin, and Venice between 1500 and 1800, I study the people, production, networks, materials, techniques, and products of this largely forgotten craft. Over the course of these centuries, artisans developed their initial engagements with feathers from a culture of making to an entrepreneurial culture of decorum. These European artisans’ forms of material engagement, I argue, engendered feathers’ affective atmospheres. The craft of featherworking affected the material translation of aesthetics since the application of complex techniques helped to perform the material properties of feathers.

Keywords: feathers; featherwork; feather-workers; making; material engagement and assemblages; affective artefacts

Craft Expertise and Aesthetics

Featherwork is widely associated with indigenous cultures. The arrival of New World feathers in late fifteenth-century Europe, however, caused pure excitement across the entire continent.¹ These feathers’ strikingly novel properties – the iridescence,

1 Stefan Hanß, “New World Feathers and the Matter of Early Modern Ingenuity: Digital Microscopes, Period Hands, and Period Eyes,” in Ingenuity in the Making: Materials and Technique in Early Modern Europe, ed. Alexander Marr, Richard Oosterhoff, and José Ramón Marcaida (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh

Burghartz, S., L. Burkart, C. Göttler, U. Rublack, Materialized Identities in Early Modern Culture, 1450–1750:

Objects, Affects, Effects. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463728959_ch03

lightness, colour intensity, motility, and gracility of feathers of American species like Amazonian parrots, Mesoamerican resplendent quetzals, and South American hum-mingbirds – defined their “affective capacities” to stimulate “emotional response(s).”² In the “material Renaissance,” feathers became highly sought-after products, traded over far-reaching distances and sold in hubs like Seville, Paris, Amsterdam, Venice, or London for the display of refined taste.³ During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans were eager to purchase, collect, and store feathers and they invested plenty of energy, money, and time in their transformation. Consequently, European artisans increasingly specialized in featherworking throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This chapter charts the hitherto unknown history of early modern European featherworking and its relationship with the world of matter and making.⁴ Focusing on feather-workers’ activities in Antwerp, Brussels, Dresden, Leipzig, London, Madrid, Milan, Nuremberg, Paris, Prague, Stuttgart, Turin, and Venice between 1500 and 1800, I study the people, production, networks, materials, techniques, and products of this largely forgotten craft. Over the course of these centuries, different products became fashionable. Artisans developed their initial engagements with feathers from a culture of making to an entrepreneurial culture of decorum. Besides hats and panaches, feathers were increasingly attached to all different kinds of things and an astonishing variety of materials became significant for such manufacturing processes. Over the entire early modern period, however, these European artisans’ forms of material engagement engendered feathers’ affective atmospheres.⁵ I argue that the craft of featherworking affected the material translation of aesthetics since the application of complex techniques helped to perform the material properties of feathers – such as their lightness, translucency, motility, and colourfulness – in culturally appreciated forms. This is what made featherwork matter for early modern materialized identities.

University Press, 2021, in press); Stefan Hanß, “Material Encounters: Knotting Cultures in Early Modern Peru and Spain,” The Historical Journal 62, no. 3 (2019): 583–615.

2 Oliver J. T. Harris and Tim F. Sørensen, “Rethinking Emotion and Material Culture,” Archaeological Dialogues 17, no. 2 (2010): 146, 150.

3 Ulinka Rublack, “Befeathering the European: The Matter of Feathers in the Material Renaissance,”

The American Historical Review 126, no. 1 (March 2021): 19–53, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhab006; Stefan Hanß, “The Material Creativity of Affective Artefacts in the Dutch Colonial World: Imaging and Imagining Early Modern Feather Fans,” Current Anthropology (in press); Stefan Hanß and Ulinka Rublack, “Knowledge Production, Image Networks, and the Material Significance of Feathers in Late Humanist Heidelberg,”

Renaissance Quarterly 74, no. 2 (2021): 1–39.

4 Michelle O’Malley and Evelyn S. Welch, eds., The Material Renaissance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Pamela H. Smith and Tonny Beentjes, “Nature and Art, Making and Knowing:

Reconstructing Sixteenth-Century Life-Casting Techniques,” Renaissance Quarterly 63 (Fall 2010): 128–179;

Ulinka Rublack, “Matter in the Material Renaissance,” Past and Present 219 (2013): 41–85.

5 Andreas Reckwitz, “Affective Spaces: A Praxeological Outlook,” Rethinking History 16, no. 2 (2012):

241–258.

This chapter reconsiders our understanding of the transformation and challenges of early modern material worlds. Featherworking artisans faced considerable challenges. The special characteristics of feathers caused the high cultural esteem in which sixteenth-century Europeans held this material. These properties, however, also opened a wide range of affordances for the processing of feathers.⁶ At first glance, feathers appear to be easily processable. A closer examination, however, reveals that their material properties gave rise to formidable obstacles. Handling such particularly soft objects was often described in comparison to graceful Renais-sance textiles like “deep-napped velvet(s).”⁷ However, precisely this tactile experience relied upon feathers’ finely developed barbs, barbules, and hooklets, which were easily damaged by handling and treatments. The iridescence that ensured the vibrancy of the material to Renaissance observers faded when featherwork was exposed to intense light and water. Low room humidity, for example, embrittled feathers.⁸ Their very composition made feathers extremely susceptible to damage.

Feathers contain more than 90 percent proteins. This chemical cocktail makes feathers predisposed to damage caused by insects, as the tailor of the southern German court of Württemberg came to realize in 1596. Overseeing the duke’s inventory, the tailor came across the miserable appearance of a grey, feather hat. He crossed out the entry and added that “the cockroaches have eaten this.”⁹ According to an inventory from 1621, the Prague imperial collections’ aigrettes were similarly

“quite consumed by worms.”¹⁰

For handling the difficulties and properties of such delicate materials, feather-workers had to master a set of complex skills that aimed to respond to the new

“sensory education” caused by, and further promoting, a changing material

6 James J. Gibson, “The Theory of Affordances,” in Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology, ed. Robert E. Shaw (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1977), 127–137; Ann-Sophie Lehmann, “The Matter of the Medium: Some Tools for an Art Theoretical Interpretation of Materials,” in The Matter of Art:

Materials, Technologies, Meanings, 1200–1700, ed. Christy Anderson, Anne Dunlop, and Pamela H. Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 21–41.

7 Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, otherwise called America, trans. Janet Whatley (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA and Oxford: University of California Press, 1990), 60. For a broader discussion, see Hanß, “Material Encounters.”

8 Chad M. Eliason and Matthew D. Shawkey, “Decreased Hydrophobicity of Iridescent Feathers: A Potential Cost of Shiny Plumage,” Journal of Experimental Biology 214 (2011): 2157–2163; C. V. Horie, “Fading of Feathers by Light,” in 9th Triennial Meeting, Dresden, German Democratic Republic, 26–31 August 1990, ed. International Council of Museums Conservation Committee (Los Angeles, CA: International Council of Museums Conservation Committee, 1990), 431–436.

9 HStAS, A 202, vol. 2394, Nr. 4, 5r; B. S. Harrap and E. F. Woods. “Species Differences in the Proteins of Feathers,” Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology 20 (1967): 449–460.

10 Heinrich Zimmermann, “Das Inventar der Prager Schatz- und Kunstkammer vom 6. Dezember 1621:

nach Akten des K. und K. Reichsfinanzarchives in Wien,” Kunsthistorische Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 25 (1905): LX.

environment.¹¹ In this chapter, I not only chart the history of early modern European featherworking, I also discuss artisans’ proficiency in material transformation and enaction. By studying the feather-workers’ dexterity and creativity, I conceptualize early modern featherworking as material engagement embedded in the feather-workshops’ material assemblages. Various protagonists engaged with the materiality of feathers to ensure their availability, to craft their shape, and to shape their aesthetics. These artisans’ material worlds – their labour organization, manual skills, and artisanal techniques – reveal how knowledge of matter and its transformation lent early modern featherwork cultural significance. On a methodological level, I combine in-depth archival research with an object-centred approach. I relate documents and artefacts with more recent debates on affordances, engagement, assemblage, and affects and thus connect history with archaeology.¹² By examining the making of affective artefacts, this chapter studies the crafting of early modern materialized identities.

Crafting the Feather Craze

Johann Wurmbein is one of at least eighteen Nuremberg artisans who manu-factured feathers into panaches, crowns, and collars during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The portrait shows his pride to be among craftsmen who mastered materials that had become indispensable items of gallantry (Fig. 3.1).

In Paris between around 1500 and 1800, at least 247 feather-workers sold and advertised a wide range of products including headwear, collars, shoulder and elbow adornments, necklaces, panaches, fans, and shin guards (Fig. 3.2).¹³ Such images reveal the self-understanding of the artisans and similarly “demonstrate the adornment potential” of feathers to clients, pointing to the imagined needs and desired wants that novel commodities like feathers evoked.¹⁴ “Artifacts act en masse to effect people,” and so too did feathers in regard to early modern craftsmen and clients: “groups of related objects […] create stylistic universes which affect producers and users of new objects, bound by the canons of style.”¹⁵ Featherwork

11 Beverly Lemire, Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures: The Material World Remade, c. 1500–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 82.

12 Gibson, “Affordances”; Lambros Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engage-ment (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2013); Yannis Hamilakis and Andrew M. Jones, “Archaeology and Assemblage,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27, no. 1 (2017): 77–84.

13 Resulting from my in-depth study of 166 finding aids in the Archives Nationales Paris.

14 Lemire, Global Trade, 79f.

15 Chris Gosden, “What Do Objects Want?,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 12, no. 3 (2005):

193f.

figure 3.1: unknown artist, nuremberg feather-worker Johann Wurmbein. Water colours and tempera on paper, 226 × 166 mm. In hausbuch der Mendelschen zwölfbrüderstiftung, 1667, fol. 151v. nuremberg, stadtbibliothek im Bildungscampus nürnberg, amb.317b.2°, f.151v. Image © stadtbibliothek im Bildung-scampus nürnberg.

figure 3.2: unknown artist (nicolas de larmessin II?), french feather-worker advertising his products, after 1695. Print, 277 × 185 mm. france, Musée Carnavalet Paris, shelf no. g.5067. Image © Musée Carnavalet / roger-Viollet.

also became a catalyst for economic entrepreneurship and engendered cultures of taste. The recent routines of global commerce provided Europeans with access to new materials. Just as Beverly Lemire argued for early modern ribbons, feathers too, belonged among novel “goods essential to this consumerist change providing new sorts of employment and new systems of delight.”¹⁶ Feathers inspired the entrepreneurial industriousness that responded to and further generated the demand for desired commodities. An increasing number of protagonists – makers, mercers, and clients – engaged in producing and purchasing the featherwork that transformed material lives in early modern Europe.

Feathers engendered craft professionalization and specialization. Starting at the beginning of the sixteenth century, artisans across Europe began to organize themselves into feather-worker guilds, whose statutes manifested featherworking as a craft bound by rules and a code of honour. In 1530, Brussels feather-workers commissioned their statutes. A “privileged guild” of plumassiers was founded in Antwerp in 1579. Twenty years later, Henry IV issued the statutes of Parisian feather-workers. Elector John George I proclaimed the regulations of Saxonian feather-workers in 1615. Those regulations of the Nuremberg artisans who specialized in processing feathers were announced nine years later.¹⁷ Guild statutes shaped the craft’s principles, defining its ritual bonds. Leipzig and Dresden feather-workers, for instance, needed to pay regular fees that helped to balance periods of low income.

Representatives were elected and met twice a year. Those who wished to become a master feather-worker needed to provide proof of being born in wedlock, having finished one’s apprenticeship and afterward travelled in good behaviour, having worked another year with a master after their return, being a local citizen, and having successfully passed the guild’s examination, a milestone which was followed by banquets.¹⁸ Both producing and trading featherwork was restricted to guild members. The rise of Parisian plumassiers, therefore, coincided with the distinction between craftsmen (maîtres) and salespersons (marchands). As a widely circulating commodity, feathers and featherwork shaped consumerist desires and caused the fashionability of panaches – a tuft of a varying number of differently manufactured feathers, whose production and trade became the subject of specialized panache-makers (panachers). Those contravening the guild’s statutes were severely punished.

Parisian plumassiers who employed non-French apprentices had to pay 500 livres to the guild’s elders. In 1630, they took proceedings against Pierre Huon, who had

16 Lemire, Global Trade, 79.

17 AVB/ASB, registre n^o3426; SA, GA#4254, 7#1150; Denis Diderot and Jean B. d’Alembert, eds., Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 12 (Paris: Samuel Fauche, 1765), 798; August Jegel, ed., Alt-Nürnberger Handwerksrecht und seine Beziehungen zu anderen (Nürnberg-Reichelsdorf:

Schmidt, 1965), 511.

18 StadtAL, LXIV Nr. 46, 11r–24v. Special thanks to Bridget Heal.

sold his featherwork via a marchand bonnetier.¹⁹ Leipzig feather-workers proceeded against Hans Kolbe, a fellow artisan from Weida, who had asked for citizenship in order to run his own feather-workshop in 1607. Leipzig artisans emphasized that Kolbe was a “blood-foreign” who had engaged in extramarital intercourse “with a foreign and alien maid,” his later wife from Glaucha. For the same reason, a similar enquiry in Magdeburg had already failed. Neither becoming a citizen nor having married an honourable burgess excluded young artisans from profits in times of increasing industriousness and competition.²⁰

Guild restrictions responded to both the material demands of feathers, which required substantial training, and the high mobility of feather-workers, who needed to have access to the global trade of feathers. Important economic hubs, courts, as well as port and trade fair cities like Antwerp, Brussels, Leipzig, London, Madrid, Nuremberg, Paris, Prague, Seville, and Venice became important sites for feather-workers’ activities. The Antwerp feather-merchant Antoine Verra, for instance, regularly travelled to Paris – most likely to buy and sell feathers – and even owned estates en route.²¹ Parisian featherwork-merchant Nicolas Le Trotteur settled in Vienna.²² Other Parisian feather-workers formed associations and signed contracts with traders that sold feathers and panaches in Lyon, Reims, and Spain.²³ Such profit-securing strategies responded to the flows of goods ensuring access to materials, resources, and markets. Turin piumassari had specialized in sending bunches of capon feathers first to Paris and then to Spain and the New World for their suitability as feather dusters.²⁴ In 1567 René Guynault, who ran his feather-workshop on the Pont Notre-Dame in Paris, set up a joint venture with the London feather-worker Sébastien Bonnefoy comprising an annual exchange worth 25 écus d’or soleil.²⁵ Further names of feather-workers active in early modern England clearly point to their continental background. Henry VIII’s feather-worker was called Gerard van Hartell. The name of Edward VI’s feather-worker of Saint Peter by Tower, Middlesex, was Paul Vrelande (d. 1551). John Gascarde manufactured feathers in Blackfriars, London, until 1604.²⁶ Moreover, Nuremberg’s first documented

feather-19 AN, MC/ET/II/152 (1636/06/25); MC/ET/VIII/632.

20 StadtAL, LXIV Nr. 46, 1r–9v.

21 AN, MIC/Y//115, 282rf.

22 AN, MC/ET/XLIII/173 (1680/05/05).

23 AN, MC/ET/X/8 (1608/05/05); MC/ET/II/140 (1632/05/17).

24 AST, commercio, mazzo 20 da ordin. cat. 4. Warm thanks to Alessandro Malusa.

25 AN, MC/ET/VIII/316 (1567/06/01).

26 Maria Hayward, Dress at the Court of King Henry VIII: The Wardrobe Book of the Wardrobe of the Robes prepared by James Worsley in December 1516, edited from Harley MS 2284, and his Inventory prepared on 17 January 1521, edited from Harley MS 4217, both in the British Library (Leeds: Maney, 2007), 334; TNA, PROB 11/34/234; PROB 11/104/348.

worker Johann Rat, alias Jan de Rat, was presumably from the Low Countries.²⁷ Migrating artisans established elaborate networks that connected featherworking hubs, promoting a sense of professional community and advancing the mobility of artisanal knowledge.

The mobility of early modern feather-workers was a vital element of their entrepreneurship. These European artisans’ profits relied on their ability to partake in the global trade of feathers – access to such markets and networks defined the success or failure of a person’s featherworking business. Nuremberg feather-worker Hans Wollandt, for example, regularly visited Venice to have access to a Mediterranean hub of, and trendsetter in, featherworking. Here, Wollandt also convinced a Venetian shopkeeper to allow him to take care of the latter’s adolescent son, Bartholomäus Viatis, who was sent to Nuremberg.

In his later autobiographical records, Bartholomäus describes the Nuremberg feather-worker Wollandt as one of the “false hearts” that he had met throughout his life. Despite Wollandt’s promise to offer Bartholomäus shelter, clothing, and provisions while training him as an apprentice, Viatis lamented “how hard I was reared in particular by his wife.” For three years in a row, the feather-worker apprentice did not drink any beverage other than water. Not even shoes were given to him and frost stigmata covered his thighs still years later. At the end of his apprenticeship, Viatis agreed to serve Wollandt as a business partner in Lyon for another four years, yet Wollandt plunged into debt, ruining the business and the reputation of Viatis. Only in 1565 was Viatis able to break with Wollandt and his co-partners. Four years later, he was granted citizenship in Nuremberg. In his journal, Viatis recorded these biographical hardships for his children’s guidance, narrating his story as a feather-worker apprentice who had become a well-to-do merchant and respectable businessman.²⁸

This biographical transformation, once again, relied on Viatis’s participation in broader commercial networks recorded in his “secret journal.” Viatis regularly visited the Frankfurt fair, yet he also maintained close ties with creditors in Bolzano, Venice, and Milan. He joined Daniel Igler’s feather-trading business in Milan, until he left for a journey to Wrocław and finally settled in Nuremberg again. Here, Viatis continued to store the financial records that document his commercial ties with merchants, dressmakers, cloth-makers, dyers, and feather-workers in Erfurt, Leipzig, Antwerp, and Italy. Feather-workers Conrath Grisser and Bernhardt Helm,

27 StAN, B14/II Nr. 31, 64r. Rat’s support for a brewer from Bruges, who had settled in Nuremberg, further corroborates this observation.

28 StAN, E1/1905, Nr. 1, Jornal vnd Schuldtbu[o]ch of Bartholomäus Viatis (1579), 1r–3v, 6r. Cf. Gerhard Seibold, Die Viatis und Peller: Beiträge zur Geschichte ihrer Handelsgesellschaft (Cologne: Böhlau, 1977).

Archival records prove these personal notes’ correctness: StadtAN, B14/I, Nr. 90, 35v–38r (1574/03/09) with reference to the missing folio 220 of StadtAN, B14/III, Nr. 35.

for instance, owed Viatis 224 gulden of which to receive he had only “little hope.”²⁹ Feather-workers’ supra-regional mobility and their far-reaching networks were a vital part of the entrepreneurial strategies that made considerable economic success possible.

The impressive demand for feathers, in fact, allowed highly specialized artisans to make a profitable living. Women, besides men, became successful entrepreneurs.

Nuremberg feather-worker Johann Rat’s wife, Felicitas, sold a feather beret for 5 gulden 3 pfund and 29 pfennig in 1533.³⁰ Two years later, Claude Jablier sold a total of 995 feathers in Paris. Twenty years on, she was still a well-known featherwork trader.³¹ Madames plumassières Denise Feucher and Marie Dangicourt welcomed customers in their early seventeenth-century shops, and Marie Joseph Toutain ran a successful featherwork and fashion shop in the rue Saint-Denis in the 1780s.³² Featherworking, in fact, made entire families prosper. When the Nuremberg house was sold to Rat’s five children in 1547, the dwelling had tripled its value to 1,000 gulden.³³ Thomas, a son of Rat’s first marriage, established his own feather-workshop in 1552.³⁴ His brother Anthonius, moreover, maintained business relations with the Negelein, one of the major featherworking families in seventeenth-century Nuremberg: Hans (1572–1641), Adrian (d. 1686), and Johann Stephan (d. 1725/9) were all well-known feather-workers.³⁵ In seventeenth-century Paris, the Poirier cousins Jean and Barthélemy as well as André, Claude, Hierosme, Jacques (I and II), Jean, Jérôme, and Pierre Pancatelin dominated the featherworking trade.³⁶

Im Dokument Materialized Identities in Early Modern Culture, 1450-1750 (Seite 138-188)