If you’ve never seen a feather portrait in person, it’s time to visit the Mudec Cultural Museum in via Tortona. The collection, owned by the city government, has just been enriched by a special guest: the Portrait of Cardinal Giulio Rospigliosi (former apostolic nuncio to Spain and later pope under the name Clement IX). This is not a portrait like the others: made in the Viceroyalty of New Spain (now Mexico) between the second half of the 1660s and the first half of the 1670s, it is an example of Amantecan art, a technique that is both subtle and not very extensive. To make them, indigenous workers, probably Purépecha from the Michoacán region, applied various layers of colorful bird feathers to sheets of paper, which were then attached to copper plates: originally used for the manufacture of sacred images and liturgical vestments on ecclesiastical commissions, this technique was seen by Catholic missionaries as a tool to encourage the process of evangelization of the native population. The extreme fragility of the material, coupled with the destruction caused by the Spanish conquistadors, led to the disappearance of almost all “feathered works”, making those that survive, such as those acquired by Mudec, particularly valuable. The portrait is an artefact of South American work but with a European flavor: it was actually inspired by a painting created by Giovanni Maria Morandi in 1656 and kept in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. Feathered works were highly coveted at the time and were present in the most important exotic collections, such as the Farnese and Chigi collections. A further rarity of the work purchased from MUDEC lies in the type of subject: there are very few portraits of this size, requiring months of painstaking work.
The work, on display from tomorrow in the room dedicated to the Settala Collection of the museum’s permanent collection, is also an important testimony to the complex relations between Italy and Latin America, often mediated by ecclesiastical diplomatic networks.
