“If He Is Converted”: A New Spanish Featherwork Ecce Homo in Southeastern Africa

Abstract

In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to the material, spiritual, and collecting histories of both pre-invasion and colonial New Spanish (Mexican) featherworks. Rapidly and globally disseminated through religious and family networks, these objects traveled from Mexico to Spain, and other locations, before the end of the sixteenth century. This article explores the little-known history of a devotional featherwork Ecce Homo sent from Portugal to southeastern Africa in 1569. Originally a gift to Sebastian I of Portugal sent from the Spanish-colonized Americas, the Ecce Homo later entered the collection of Catherine of Austria, Sebastian’s grandmother. Catherine presented it to the Jesuits accompanying the Portuguese evangelizing and gold-seeking mission to Mutapa, a vast kingdom that encompassed parts of present-day Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Its intended recipient was the Mutapa emperor. However, this was not a gift meant to grease the wheels of diplomacy, nor was it designated as a tool for conversion: it was, instead, meant for the Mutapa emperor “se se convertese”—if he is converted. That is, it was conceived as a gift from one Catholic monarch to another, for use in personal devotion. The perceived spiritual efficacy of these feather images —themselves recently assimilated to Catholic Iberia from polytheistic Mesomerica—thus extended well beyond the transatlantic Iberian realms.

1. Introduction

In 1569, four Jesuit fathers gathered in Almeirim, Portugal, to prepare for an expedition to the Mwene Mutapa empire in southeastern Africa.1 Before embarking on their journey, they visited Catherine of Austria (1507–1578; regent 1557–1562) at the royal palace.2 Although she had traveled the sixty miles from Lisbon to Almeirim to convince Sebastian I, her grandson, to abort the mission, she eventually consented. Once committed, she selected “several objects of devotion from her chamber” for the Jesuits to give to Monomotapa (Emperor) Negomo Mupunzagutu (r. c.1560–1589), of the Mwene Mutapa empire (Monclaro 1899).3 These included a New Spanish feather mosaic Ecce Homo and an ivory crucifix. Both were intended for the emperor “se se Converteshe” (“if he [was] converted”) to Christianity (Monclaro 1899).4 I seek to recover and explore the little-known history of this feather Ecce Homo, an object that traveled great distances as part of a colonial mission. I will also place the Ecce Homo, which does not survive, in the broader context of similar New Spanish feather mosaics and consider how both the materials from which this object was made, most importantly the feathers of Mesoamerican birds, and its movement among several distinct but intersecting cultures and religious traditions made meaning, and made multiple meanings at that.

2. Frameworks

I acknowledge the limits of my understanding of the history of southeastern Africa in the early modern period; I am approaching this material as a specialist in early modern Spain and the Spanish-colonized Americas. In addition, as an art historian, a key challenge for both this article and my other work on objects that circulated in and around the Spanish Habsburg court is grappling with the history of lost artworks. Many of the objects I address in my dissertation and articles, from feather, metal, and stone objects made by indigenous artists prior to the Spanish invasions of the Americas, to ceramics, furniture, and paintings made by artists working in the early modern Spanish realms, do not survive. They were often victims of material degradation over time. Others were auctioned to settle debts, moving from documented collections to undocumented ones. Precious metals were melted down, converted into new works or into more fungible cash. Myriad works were destroyed by fires, including in the conflagrations at Madrid’s royal palaces, the Alcazar and Buen Retiro, in the 18th and 19th centuries. The featherwork Ecce Homo of this article disappears from the historical record after the late 16th century and seems to have left no material trace, though I hesitate to abandon all hope for its survival.

Given the ravages of time, my attempts to reconstruct the histories of lost objects heavily rely on textual evidence, primarily inventories and contemporary accounts, both of which are generally reductive and concise. Writers of inventories often have hundreds, if not thousands, of objects to account for, and their expertise may lie in the management of collections rather than in the use, materials, or meaning(s) of individual objects. Account writers, often government officials, diplomats, royalty, aristocrats, and clerics, likewise did not usually have specialized knowledge of the objects they described. Furthermore, often, their descriptions are offered in passing, either incidental to or minor players in a broader account.

My history of the featherwork Ecce Homo is strongly colored by the Portuguese perspective because that is how it comes to us: through the written words of Francisco de Monclaro (b. 1531, d.?), one of four Jesuits who joined an ultimately unsuccessful mission to the Mwene Mutapa empire in 1569–1573.5 Little is known about Monclaro and he, like the Ecce Homo, seems to disappear from the historical record after the mission.6 Despite his brief archival presence, Monclaro does appear to be a reliable narrator. He asserts that he was “of the said company” of Jesuits referenced in the account’s title, Relacaõ da Viagem Q Fizeraõ Os Pes. Da Companhia de Jesus com Franco. Barretto na Conquista de Monomotapa no Anno de 1569 [Account of the Journey Made by Fathers of the Company of Jesus with Francisco Barreto in the Conquest of the Monomotapa in the Year 1569] (Monclaro 1899). In addition, both the length of his account and the specificity of his description of the Ecce Homo, including its size, suggest that he was an eyewitness to both the object and the mission.7 Indeed, that Monclaro says that the featherwork is “as big as the quarter of a sheet of paper of the largest size, of a very strange fashion and material” suggests that he saw it firsthand, and was also thoughtful enough to provide his reader with a size referent (Monclaro 1899).8 Monclaro’s descriptions of the customs of the people he encounters in southeastern Africa as well as his descriptions of local flora and fauna, also have the feel of a firsthand account.

Nevertheless, this is a story largely told through the words of a racist European evangelizer in a region of Africa without strong religious ties to Christian Europe.9 Monclaro’s position as a Jesuit missionary following in the footsteps of a martyred predecessor, the missionary Gonzalo da Silveira (more on this later), must have colored his account. Monclaro would have been aware of the precarity of his position as a foreign moralizer in a region with a history of enacting violence against European Christians. Yet, it was the very failure of Silveira’s mission, in the early 1560s, that provided both the framework and the opportunity for the expedition Monclaro joined: Silveira’s efforts must be redeemed, conversion must be again attempted, and territorial conquest (including of supposed gold and silver mines) must be realized. Monclaro’s account allows us to consider the role that the Portuguese imagined the Ecce Homo might play in the larger moral, political, and economic mission. I posit that, in the eyes of the Portuguese, the spiritual and material entanglements of the Ecce Homo reached well beyond the transatlantic Iberian realms (Spain, Portugal, New Spain) in which feather mosaics are more frequently found in the historical and material record.

The Ecce Homo’s materiality also invites us to consider the indigenous Mesoamerican artist who made it, including his world(s), experiences, and beliefs. In recent years, and especially with the 2015 publication of the long-awaited monograph Images Take Flight, scholars have greatly expanded our understanding of the technical, material, aesthetic, and spiritual aspects of pre-invasion and New Spanish feather art. Feather objects were among the earliest Mesoamerican artworks to appear in Europe. Mexica feather shields, fans, crests, and headdresses arrived in 1519, shortly after the Spanish invasion of Mexico.10 Along with other spectacular objects that originated in the court of Moctezuma II, they were sent to Charles V by the invader Hernán Cortés. They were eventually displayed at Coudenberg Palace, in Brussels, as part of the festivities celebrating Charles’ assumption of the imperial throne. Thus, from the earliest stages of their life in Europe, feather objects and other indigenous American artworks were deliberately linked to, and presented as evidence of, Habsburg imperialism.

3. Discussion

3.1. Indigenous Materialities, Indigenous Spiritualities

Much of what we know about the technique and ritual use of pre-contact featherworks come from sixteenth-century manuscripts and accounts produced by missionary-scholars such as Bernardino de Sahagún and Diego Durán.11 In Mexica culture, feather ornaments were used in ceremonial and ritual contexts. The Mexica adorned their gods, rulers, and human sacrifices with feather headdresses and feather mosaic shields as part of the discourse and practice of tribute, offering, and sacrifice. Feathers were one of the essential elements of these practices, and, indeed, marked them as spiritual.

As Allison Caplan has recently explored, “Nahua viewers of the last postclassic and early colonial periods understood featherworks to display the animating force of tonalli” (Caplan 2020). Tonalli is associated with the soul, the spirit, and destiny or fate, and is “understood to adhere in humans, animals, and certain objects” (Caplan 2020). It is, as Caplan says, a “vivifying force”, the very force that makes something living rather than inanimate (Caplan 2020). Caplan’s careful reading of feather classifications and featherwork production in Sahagún’s Florentine Codex reveals that Mexica feather artists paired feathers rich in tonalli, known as tlazohihhuitl, or “beloved feathers” with those devoid of tonalli, known as macehualihhuital, or “commoner feathers” (Caplan 2020). The reflective, often iridescent, living tlazohihhuitl, from birds such as the lovely cotinga, the roseate spoonbill, and the hummingbird, were physically supported, in the very construction of the featherworks, by the duller, inanimate macehualihhuital.12 The contrasting optical qualities of the two types of feathers “create[d] a visual experience of a work that generates and exudes its own light” and “gave rise to the expression of tonalli” (Caplan 2020). These featherworks, made with feathers skillfully chosen and cared for by master artists, thus manifested tonalli: they exuded spirit, they were alive.

In addition to their association with religious beliefs that were grounded in an understanding of the interdependence of the natural and spiritual worlds, some feathers utilized in featherworks, such as those of the hummingbird and of the quetzal, were also associated with the Mexica pantheon. Identifying the avian species of feathers used in featherworks is challenging, requiring the very careful examination of often degraded materials as well as specialized scientific knowledge that is outside of the remit of most art historians. Nevertheless, Brendan McMahon has had recent success in identifying hummingbird feathers in both microcarvings (delicate wooden sculptures of Christian subjects placed against a backdrop of iridescent feathers, all nestled within metalwork pendants decorated with enamel and stones) and featherwork panels similar in size to the Ecce Homo (McMahon 2021a, 2021b). Quetzal feathers, with their brilliant green hue, are featured in the spectacular feather headdress that was formerly (though erroneously, as Christian Feest has convincingly argued) associated with Moctezuma II and is now in the Weltmuseum in Vienna (Feest 1990).13 They may also have been used in post-invasion featherworks.

In Mexico, a hummingbird headdress was the key attribute of Huitzilopochtli, a solar and war god who was also the tutelary god of the Mexica. With a name translating to “Hummingbird on the Left”, Huitzilopochtli was hummingbird-esque in his behaviors and characteristics. Indeed, as Iris Montero Sobrevilla shows, the Mexica understood hummingbirds to exhibit “various [unique and] desirable behaviors” that primed them for deification: “their capacity for energy budgeting through torpor; their sizeable appetite and codependence with flowers; their swiftness and flexibility in flight; and their capacity for long-haul migration” (Montero Sobrevilla 2020). The Mexica analogized these behaviors to the patterns and cycles they observed in the natural world. The hummingbird’s vacillation between activity and torpor was likened to both the daily cycle of day and night and seasonal cycles of spring and winter (or, as Montero Sobrevilla posits, rainy and dry periods). Hummingbirds’ dietary dependence on nectar, and plants’ complementary dependence on hummingbirds for pollination, was a “central metaphor of fertility and rebirth” (Montero Sobrevilla 2020).

Hummingbirds’ swiftness and migratory prowess, meanwhile, were mapped onto Huitzilopochtli. Montero Sobrevilla notes that Diego Duran described the god as a “warrior so fast he was never caught”. Furthermore, the Mexicas’ bond with the god was cemented early on, when he guided them on their great migration from their northern ancestral-mythical homeland of Aztlan to the Valley of Mexico, where they settled in Tenochtitlan (present-day Mexico City). As a solar deity in the guise of a hummingbird, Huitzilopochtli embodied the primal forces of the sun and war: he powered the daily cycle of day and night, the yearly cycle of seasons, and the metaphysical cycle of birth and rebirth; he was a swift, hard-to-catch warrior; and he was a master migrant.

Like Huitzilopochtli, Quetzalcoatl, the “feathered serpent”, was a major Mexica deity who embodied desirable animal characteristics associated with natural and human phenomena. Quetzalcoatl was associated with rulership, the priesthood, and, in his related form, Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl, with the life-giving, rain-bringing wind, the movement and the breath of nature that, with the rain and the sun, keeps the earth alive (Miller and Taube 1993).14 As depicted in a variety of late postclassic and early colonial Nahua codices, Quetzalcoatl was a flying serpent with the long, curving, and iridescent green tail feathers of the resplendent quetzal, a bird native to the tropical forests of southern Mexico and Central America.15 As Elodie Depuy Garcia asserts, the quetzal feathers of Quetzalcoatl “refer…to the wind god as bringer of rain, by virtue of their color as well as their elongated shape and their undulant movement” (Depuy García 2020).16 As the feathered serpent undulates through the sky, it creates the wind that ushers in the rain; like Huitzilopochtli, Quetzalcoatl’s avian attributes connect the god to natural phenomena (in this case, meteorological) as well as the yearly cycle of the dry and rainy seasons. Other depictions of Quetzalcoatl with a black body also link the zoomorphic deity to the night sky; these depictions allude to the key role that the deity plays in the daily cycles of day and night (Depuy García 2020).

For Mexica and other Nahua artists, objects—shields, headdresses—made with feathers would have been imbued with multiple, layered meanings. In addition to their optical and aesthetic richness, feathered objects materialized the world of the gods. To wear and use them was to transcend human bodily materiality (skin, teeth, nails, hair) and tangibly bridge the divide between the human the animal, and the human and the divine. Following Caplan, carefully and skillfully made featherworks did this by exhibiting tonalli: they were alive and sacred, and their tonalli increased that of the user or wearer.

3.2. Divinities of Post-Invasion Featherworks

Although the production of Nahua-style featherworks virtually ceased with the fall of the Mexica state in the early 1520s, indigenous ideas about featherworks’ tonalli survived into the colonial period.17 By the 1550s, indigenous Mexican amentecas, or feather artists, were collaborating with Spanish friars to produce feather artworks with Christian subject matter, for both local and European audiences. Well-known examples include Juan Bautista Cuiris’ companion images of Christ at the Age of Twelve and the Weeping Virgin in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (see Figure 1), the Mass of Saint Gregory, in the Musée des Jacobins in Auch, France, and several bishop’s miters, in El Escorial, Milan, and New York, among other locations. These artworks were finely made, and Europeans found them both visually and haptically appealing. They were highly desirable, and thus highly mobile, often moving from New Spain to Spain, and then on to Florence, Rome, or Prague within the span of only a few years. Some, like the Ecce Homo, traveled even farther; in the late 16th century, at least one New Spanish featherwork was sent to China (Kasl 2022). Monclaro’s account of the 1569 Portuguese expedition to the Mutapa kingdom is, to my knowledge, the only document attesting to the presence of New Spanish featherworks in Africa.

Post-invasion featherworks were the product of collaborations between Spaniards and indigenous people, and helped to make new ideas, beliefs, languages, and artistic practices mutually intelligible. Scholars have understood these objects as tools for explicating complex Christian concepts such as the Trinity, the sacrificial nature of Christ, and the resurrection. Indigenous feather artists, working alongside Christian missionaries, would learn Christian theology by creating images of the Virgin Mary, Christ, the Passion, and saints with tonalli-rich feathers. During mass or in private devotion, these featherworks would impart Catholic stories and values to indigenous new Christians.

In this paradigm, the Christian image itself does the work of conversion, turning pagan, polytheistic ritual objects and materials into Christian ones. Imagine yourself as a Portuguese or Spanish guest in the inner chamber of Catherine’s nephew Philip II. The king places side by side on a sturdy oak table a Mexica feather shield and the featherwork Ecce Homo. The feathers seduce you. They glow, they shine, and they change color and luminosity as you shift your weight, as you move, and also as the light itself, whether natural or artificial (candlelight), shifts. The objects are carefully, lovingly, and skillfully made. They are not mere everyday things. They are art.

The marker of difference between the shield and the Ecce Homo for you, for the Habsburgs, is their iconography, not their feathers. The feathers of both the shield and of the pathos-laden image of Christ, are visually marvelous. They also seemingly, miraculously, retain their spirit—their tonalli—in the shift from the Mesoamerican polytheistic realm to the Christian one. In bridging the divide between the human and the avian, the feathers also bridge the divide between the human and the divine. This is true for both Christian and Nahua believers: the feathers facilitate transcendence. For the Christian beholder, however, the tonalli of the shield is pagan, while that of the Ecce Homo is on the side of Christian righteousness. It is the image of the suffering Christ that has enacted this conversion.

Now imagine yourself as a maker of such finery, of such a wonder as the Ecce Homo. You are an artist, a Nahua or Purépecha amanteca, and a recent convert to Christianity working in Mexico City or Michoacán, two of the colonial centers of featherwork production.18 For you, the hummingbird feathers of both the shield and the Ecce Homo signal transformation, seasonal cycles, and renewal; this understanding of feathers is part of your culture, your lived experience. Can you separate the tonalli of the shield from that of the Ecce Homo? As a new Christian, has a Franciscan friar such as Sahagún convinced you that your previous understanding of renewal, growth, and transformation, accessed through objects like the shield, was only a stepping stone on the way to a full embrace of the transformative, renewing, resurrecting promise of Christ as embodied in the Ecce Homo? The question here is the very nature of “conversion”, which implies a breakage between the past and the present, and the renunciation of previously held beliefs. Expanding upon McMahon’s characterization of featherworks as “contingent images” that produced a “plurality of viewing experiences”, we may also consider them as producing a plurality of religious or spiritual experiences. In other words, for an amanteca or other indigenous viewer, both the shield and the Ecce Homo are imbued with tonalli. They both provide access to the divine. In contrast to the experience of an Iberian Christian, for an indigenous Mexican the divinity of the Ecce Homo might encompass both, or move fluidly between, Mexica polytheism and Christianity.

Both McMahon and I are all grappling with what Alessandra Russo called the “slippery endeavor” of “seeking evidence of…parallel sensibilities” in the production and reception of featherwork in New Spain (Russo 2015). In undertaking this thought exercise, I am trying to understand colonial featherworks as both loci for mutual transculturation and as objects that challenge the reductive binary of the Christian and the pagan, the indigenous and the colonized. The implied moralities of these binaries, moreover, favor the Christian and the colonizer; they are bigoted. Through their production, Spanish religious colonizers communicated Christian theology, history, and stories to indigenous amantecas. Indigenous amentecas, on the other hand, both taught their Spanish collaborators new artistic techniques and, very likely, explicated plumological tonalli. Through their work with tonalli-rich feathers, they also kept alive the material and spiritual worlds of the pre-invasion Nahua. One worldview was not erased by the other; rather, in featherworks, for indigenous makers and users, they coexisted.

Following Cécile Fromont in her recent work on cross-cultural image-making in Central Africa, I want to think of post-invasion featherworks as not mere hybridizations of Mesoamerican and European visual and material cultures, but as objects “penned by encounter” (Fromont 2022). When we consider the heretofore invisible aspects of featherwork production, including the conversations and human relationships that created the conditions under which such objects could be made, featherworks emerge not as European-conceived images utilizing Mesoamerican materials, but as objects from Mesoamerica “molded by the dialogue that unfolded between” European missionaries and Mesoamericans (Fromont 2022). This framework is akin to the one Alessandra Russo proposed in 2014 and which she coined the “untranslatable”. In her book, Russo quotes the philosopher Barbara Cassin, who asserts that “the untranslatable is…what one never stops (not) translating” (Russo 2014).19 In other words, to work with the “untranslatable” is to be continually translating, to engage in an ongoing process of negotiating among different cultural, religious, artistic, and other systems and to attempt to navigate among seemingly irreconcilable “forms, concepts, and…know-hows” (Russo 2014). In the field of early modern art history, Russo cites objects such as featherworks as particularly “untranslatable”. In the 16th century, featherwork makers, users, and collectors were continually negotiating the disparate worlds of Nahua Mesoamerica, Catholic Europe, and the very new, pluralistic world of New Spain. For scholars and museum visitors today, to engage with featherworks is to explore “realms of knowledge that are also mutually untranslatable”, including, as Russo points out, “history, aesthetics, anthropology, but also ornithology, linguistics, restoration practices, and geography” (Russo 2014).

3.3. Post-Invasion Featherworks as Christian Objects

While most of the pre-invasion Nahua and other indigenous American featherworks in 16th century Spanish Habsburg collections were placed in storage (as was the case for Charles V’s collection), outside of Spain they were sometimes displayed in Kunstkammern, or cabinets of curiosity, such as in Ferdinand II’s collection at Schloss Ambras. In other words, many Europeans treated them as curiosities, as not-fully-knowable phenomena, and as evidence of territorial, cultural, and religious conquest.

By contrast, inventories suggest that post-invasion New Spanish featherwork in Habsburg Spain (that is, feather art with Catholic iconography) was displayed and used alongside other religious or devotional images. At least sixteen post-invasion works are documented in courtly Habsburg collections: two, a miter and a portable altar (possibly a triptych), were among the thousands of religious objects that Philip II sent to El Escorial in the 1570s and 1580s; two Crucifixion scenes were ordered deposited in the convent of the Descalzas Reales by its founder, Juana of Austria (niece and daughter-in-law of Catherine of Austria) after her death in 1573; a triptych was part of the devotional collection of Prince Don Carlos, Philip’s ill-fated son (and great-nephew of Catherine) who died in 1568; another triptych was in the collection of Don Juan Hurtado de Mendoza, the duque del Infantado (d. 1624), a close advisor to Philip IV; and ten featherworks depicting the Virgin and a variety of saints were in the collections of a handful of aristocrats, including Doña Maria de Aragón (1539–1593), a lady-in-waiting to both Ana of Austria (Philip II’s fourth, and last, wife) and Isabella Clara Eugenia (his eldest daughter), and Cardinal Gaspar de Borja y Velasco, the Archbishop of Seville from 1632–1645 and, briefly, Archibishop of Toledo, in 1645.20

The two post-invasion featherworks that Philip II sent to El Escorial were intended to be used for religious purposes. The miter, which survives, was sent for the “servicio del culto divino [service of the divine cult]” and is listed in a 1574 inventory among “los ornamentos y ropa blanca y otras cosas [the ornaments and linens and other things]” for liturgical use.21 As late as 1666, it was inventoried as one of seven miters stored with hose, garters, gloves, a pectoral cross, and a gold ring in a room near the sacristy.22 The other featherwork was sent to El Escorial in 1584, and is inventoried among chalices, chasubles, altar frontals, and miters. It is described as:

Vnas palabras de consagracion hechas de plumas de diverssas colores Guarnecidas de plata dorada con una peana de la misma plata dorada en que se atornilla con un Agnus dei Grande Redondo Illumminado, por la una parte xpo crucificado y nuestra senora y sanct Juan y de la otra el cordero y por Remate en lo alto del Agnus dei una crucetica pequena de plata y en ella xpo crucificado el qual dicho Agnus dei se atornilla en lo alto de las dichas palabras de conSagracion [(The) words of consecration made of feathers of diverse colores…(with,) in one part the crucified Christ and Our Lady and Saint John and in the other the lamb…].23

The Words of Consecration (also called the Words of Institution) are spoken during the sacrament of the Eucharist and echo Christ’s Last Supper exhortation to take the bread as his body and the wine as his blood. These words are the very heart of the Eucharist, and can only be spoken by an ordained priest. In proclaiming them, the priest acts as the vessel of Christ. From the twelfth century, these words have been understood to be what changes the bread to the body and the wine to the blood. If we imagine a priest reading, and then speaking, the words from the Escorial featherwork, the feathers also speak. They are the medium through which the sacred transformation, that is, the sacrament, is enacted.

It is precisely the marriage of message and material that gives such works their power. The central sacrament of Christianity is here represented in materials, Mesoamerican feathers, that are new to the faith. For Christian believers, a conversion has occurred: a material once employed in the facture of Nahua ritual objects is now employed in Catholic ritual objects. The sacred, spiritual resonances of Mesoamerican feathers have also been claimed for the Catholic church and attest to its, and the Christian God’s, global reach. In this way, the very materiality of the altar underscores the salvific and transformative power of the Eucharist. Moreover, the feathers would have been beautiful to behold, evoking traditional European media such as enamel and embroidery while surpassing even the finest silk threads in their luminosity and iridescence.

The appeal of featherworks as not mere curiosities, but as aids to Christian devotion, may be tied to the feathered birds and angels that were a part of the Judeo-Christian imaginary from the very early period.24 In the book of Genesis, a dove brings the sign that the waters of the Great Flood have receded and that God’s promise to Noah has been fulfilled. In the Gospels, the Holy Spirit descends on Jesus “like a dove” at his baptism. Moreover, doves appear in Christian art, as visual metaphors for the Holy Spirit, as early as the medieval period, usually in baptism scenes. Around the same time, the angel of the Annunciation begins to be regularly depicted, visually, with feather-covered wings.

In this context, the Iberian adoption and use of devotional New Spanish featherworks can be seen as an extension of the tradition that associates birds and feathers with the presence of the Holy Spirit, the third part of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit is materialized in the very feathers that constitute, for example, the Words of Institution. The feathers literalize the book of John, chapter one, verse one: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”. If the Words of Institution transform bread and wine to the body and blood of Christ, we might understand the feathers of the Escorial altar as a materialization of this animating spirit, of its tonalli. Moreover, as Russo has argued, this association was also present in indigenous sixteenth-century New Spain, where the Holy Spirit was likened to the quetzal, whose iridescent feathers were so often used to dramatic effect in featherworks; thus, for a newly-converted indigenous audience, these objects “exhibit the Holy Spirit in the very material…of its composition” (Russo 2002).

While the Escorial featherwork altar was most likely liturgically used, by a priest during the sacrament of the Eucharist, other featherwork triptychs and panels that appear in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish inventories suggest more intimate, devotional—that is, domestic—uses. A triptych “hecha de pluma de yndias de diferentes colores [made of feathers from the Indies of different colors]” that depicts the Descent from the Cross in the central panel and elements of the Passion in the wings appears in the 1570 post-mortem inventory of Prince Don Carlos, in a section dedicated to “ymajenes y cosas de devocion [images and things of devotion]”. This suggests that the prince incorporated the New Spanish object into his devotional repertoire, though its religious value was subsumed by its monetary value after his death: appraised at fifty ducados, it was sold at a significantly higher sum, seventy ducados, to the “baxador de Lorena [ambassador from Lorraine]”.25

The level of detail found in the Escorial and Don Carlos inventories is rare. However, another piece of evidence supporting the devotional use of Mexican featherworks amongst the Habsburgs is in the post-mortem inventory of Doña Maria de Aragón, made in 1593. In a section dedicated to objects found in the lady’s oratory, we find figures of Christ, an Agnus Dei, images of various saints, a reliquary, and “una ymagen de nra Sra hecha de pluma de la india [an image of Our Lady made from feathers from the Indies]”.26 Such a context suggests that Doña Maria, like Don Carlos, assimilated New Spanish featherworks to a typically Spanish devotional practice.

This was true of Catherine of Austria’s Ecce Homo, which Monclaro says was chosen for the Monomotapa from among the queen’s corpus of devotional objects. It is unclear what this object may have looked like, as no feather Ecce Homos are known to survive. Contemporary Spanish images of the Ecce Homo, such as those by the painter Luis de Morales (see, for example, the one in the Prado, P000941) as well as Northern European prints (see Hans Sebald Beham’s 1521 woodcut Ecce Homo in the British Museum, BM, E,2.211) are possible models. The Vienna Weeping Virgin featherwork, capturing Mary in solitary grief after her son’s death, is, to my mind, the most apropos comparison (see Figure 1). The devotional appeal of such images of suffering is clear. In the case of the Ecce Homo, in a pathos-laden passage from the gospel of John Pontius Pilate presents the bloodied, exhausted Christ, wearing the Crown of Thorns, to the gathered crowd of Jews. “Behold the man!” Pilate says.27 Behold your miserable king! Such an image is designed to elicit feelings of sorrow, of empathy, and even of guilt in the faithful; the viewer assumes the place of the priests and officials who, according to the Gospels, exhort Pilate to crucify Jesus.

Yet the Ecce Homo’s feathers would have also alluded to the transformation soon to take place. Feather images contain multitudinous colors, but those colors are unstable (“contingent” per McMahon), constantly shifting in tone and luminosity as the viewer moves around the artwork, and as light conditions change. They manifest impermanence. The central hope of Christianity lies in this condition: that the broken, martyred Christ of the Ecce Homo will soon depart the earthly realm to become the savior of humanity. The feathers in such an image may have evoked not just the Holy Spirit, but the very promise of Christian transcendence. If, as was likely, the Ecce Homo incorporated hummingbird feathers, this transcendence would have been reinforced, certainly in the eyes of an indigenous beholder, but perhaps also in those of a learned European or creole one familiar with recent works such as Sahagún’s, by the hummingbird’s propensity for endurance and rebirth.

That such an image, designed to spiritually move the viewer, was among Catherine’s private objects of devotion is not surprising. The queen was a champion of the Jesuits in Portugal, and the drama and intimacy of the Ecce Homo resonates with the meditative, contemplative, and empathetic spiritual practices formulated by the Jesuits’ founder, Ignatius of Loyola (Jordan Gschwend 2018). Moreover, she was a major collector of extra-European artworks and other objects, primarily from Portuguese territories in India and southeast Asia. Among these were jewel-encrusted agate bowls from Goa, bezoar stones, and Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) ivories; the ivory crucifix that accompanied the Ecce Homo to Mozambique and intended as another aid to Christian devotion may have been made in Sri Lanka or Goa, both part of the Portuguese colonial realms in the 16th century (Haag 2018).28 However, to my knowledge, the feather Ecce Homo was one of the few—perhaps the only—object in Catherine’s from the Spanish Americas (she did own objects from Brazil).29 As Annemarie Jordan Gschwend notes, “a system to obtain these rarities was organized from the outset of Catherine’s reign [as queen of Portugal, in 1525]: factors, merchants, agents, goldsmiths, Portuguese viceroys and household officials stationed in Goa, Cochin [now Kochi, India], and Malacca were recruited to aid the queen in her search for exclusive items” (Jordan Gschwend 2005).

3.4. Featherworks as Gifts

Given the paucity of documentary sources on the Ecce Homo, I am only able to speculate on its route to Catherine’s chamber in Almeirim. Monclaro claims that the featherwork “was sent as a great present to his Majesty [Sebastian I] from the Spanish Indies” and then, presumably, given to Catherine (Monclaro 1899). I think the actual provenance was more complicated. The Ecce Homo was likely first sent to Philip II from New Spain rather than directly to Sebastian. The Spanish king had other New Spanish feather works in his collection, including the Words of Institution altar and the bishop’s miter deposited in El Escorial. Philip might then have sent the Ecce Homo to his cousin Sebastian, who then gave it to his grandmother (and Philip’s aunt), Catherine, for her chamber, most likely the one in her Lisbon palace.30 This gift-giving network was characteristic of the Habsburg family. As its members were dispersed, through marriage, across Europe, gifts cemented geographically distant family relationships and reified Habsburg imperial power.

As the cultural critic Lewis Hyde explains, gift-giving is part of a small group economy, with “three related obligations: the obligation to give, the obligation to accept, and the obligation to reciprocate” (Hyde 1983).31 These obligations serve to establish and reinforce relationships between the givers and receivers of gifts, and the circulation of gifts within a group leads to a “decentralized cohesiveness” (Hyde 1983). In both presenting and receiving gifts, the parties involved acknowledged the objects’ ability, and power, to bind and tie together. While Mesoamerican featherworks were certainly not the only things to be assigned such symbolic power in Habsburg circles, their employment as gifts attests to their privileged place in the material culture of elite early modern Europe. Moreover, featherworks allowed both giver and receiver to participate in the global projects of the Iberian kingdoms, and to vicariously visit New Spain without ever leaving Europe, as was the case for Catherine and other Habsburg monarchs.

The related phenomena of circulation among similar and disparate people and cultures has been conceptualized by the anthropologist Barbara Yngvesson as “enchainment” (Yngvesson 2002). Writing about transnational adoption, Yngvesson posits that rather than taking on new or different or “complete” identities, such adoptees “bear witness to the tension between” “incommensurable humanities” (Yngvesson 2002). We might then think of the New Spanish Ecce Homo as a tangible sign of the “enchainment” of Philip, Sebastian, Catherine, and, as Catherine imagined, the Monomotapa.32 In this framework, the Ecce Homo can be understood as an unspeaking witness—the only witness—to the incommensurability (or untranslatability) of Nahua, Spanish, New Spanish, and Mutapa humanities. It is the thing that binds them together.

3.5. The Ecce Homo in Mutapa

This, of course, finally returns us to the Mutapa kingdom, where the arrival of the Ecce Homo would have allowed the Monomotapa to enter this enchainment of incommensurability. The kingdom was located between the Zambesi River to the north and the Limpopo River to the south, in present-day Mozambique and Zimbabwe. However, there is little in-depth scholarship about the kingdom, and the location of the capital is unclear; it may have been near Mount Darwin, in present-day Zimbabwe. The kingdom encompassed several ethnic groups. Swahili people, who were mostly Islamic, populated the coastal regions of the Mutapa kingdom; they had long participated in the Indian Ocean trade with merchants from India and the Arab world. The interior of the kingdom was the home of the Bantu ethnic group; the descendants of the Mutapa Bantu are the modern-day Shona people of Zimbabwe.

The Portuguese and the Mutapa Swahili first came into contact in 1498, during Vasco de Gama’s voyage to India (1497–1499). The former, recognizing an opportunity to tap into the Indian Ocean trade along the southeastern coast of Africa, soon established a port at Sofala, just south of present-day Beira, launching Portugal’s colonizing project in this region. This was the primary Portuguese port on mainland Mozambique in the early sixteenth century. After an economic decline in the 1530s, however, Portuguese attention shifted north, to the Zambesi valley, and, even further, to Mozambique Island, the new preferred port.

The 1569–1573 expedition recounted by Monclaro was led by Francisco Barreto, a Portuguese general and viceroy of Goa (1555–1558), and was organized at a huge scale, with a thousand men on three ships accompanying Barreto from Portugal (Vila-Santa 2016). The mission was three-fold: to conquer the region and gain control of purported gold mines in the interior; to convert the people of Mutapa to Christianity; and to avenge the death of the Jesuit missionary Gonzalo da Silveira.

Silveira had arrived at the court of Monomotapa Negomo in January 1561. A contemporary account of Silveira’s mission, compiled from multiple eyewitness sources by Luís Fróis (1532–1597), a Jesuit stationed in Goa, notes that the Monomotapa was so taken with a sculpture of the Virgin that Silveira had on his altar that the Jesuit gave the image to him; while in the Monomotapa’s chambers, the statue supposedly glowed with a “divine light” and “spoke to the king with great sweetness of manner”, though he was unable to understand the words she spoke (Fróis 1561). Here, the miraculously animated Virgin was the vanguard of the conversion process, as she was during the Spanish invasions of the Americas. With her sweet, motherly manner and her supernatural aura, the Virgin exercised what we might call the soft-power approach to evangelization. Once she worked her magic, missionaries such as Silveira would get to work teaching theology and Christian ritual practice. By contrast, the sheer numbers and implied force of the accompanying party of men (including, on the Barreto mission, some 550 soldiers) embodied a markedly harder power (Monclaro 1899).33

In order to remedy the Monomotapa’s incomprehension and allow the Virgin to succeed as an evangelist, the emperor asked Silveira to baptize him, as the Jesuit told him that he would only understand the Virgin’s words if he were a Christian; Silveira complied and also baptized an additional 250–300 people at the court (Fróis 1561). However, the conversion of the Monomotapa and his courtiers was ultimately unsuccessful. The Islamic traders and merchants at the Mutapa court felt threatened by the growing influence of Christianity, and soon turned the king against Silveira, who was strangled to death in March 1561.

The Portuguese had, in the early 1560s, understood the people of the Mutapa kingdom as monotheistic, and thus primed for conversion. Doubts about the Mutapa people’s “readiness” for Christianity may have arisen after the murder of Silveira, and, this is where the Ecce Homo comes in, as part of the later mission: Monclaro explicitly states that Catherine wanted the featherwork to be given to the Monomotapa “if he is converted” (se se convertese in the original Portuguese). Catherine did not view the gift as a means of conversion, but as a tool for practicing Catholicism, one, perhaps, with tangential diplomatic benefits (Hsu 2004).

This is in contrast to a later gift of featherworks that Philip II intended to send with an embassy to the Wanli Emperor in China, in 1580 (this embassy was delayed and ultimately abandoned, the objects never actually traveling to China) (Wang Romero 2018).34 As Ronda Kasl writes, this intended gift, which also included clocks, mirrors, fine textiles, weaponry, and paintings of both the Virgin Mary and of Philip II, was conceived as diplomatic, with tangential salvific possibilities. Although the goal of the mission was to “[convert] the [Wanli] emperor and his subjects to Christianity”, with Philip, in absentia, acting as “an instrument of Christian salvation”, Philip ordered that the gifts for the emperor were to be “chosen with great attention to their rarity or ‘strangeness’” and also for “their material association with Spanish America”, one of Philip’s own imperial territories, as a means to impress the Chinese emperor (Kasl 2022). While the Portuguese king’s mission to the Mutapa empire shared this goal of conversion, Catherine conceived of her featherwork Ecce Homo not merely as a marvelous and impressive rarity, but as a gift from one Catholic monarch to another, for use in personal devotion, and as a tool for evoking the same feelings of Christian sorrow and transcendence that she perhaps experienced.

If the Ecce Homo was not to facilitate the Monomotapa’s re-conversion during the Barreto mission, who or what was? Following the death of Barreto from a gastrointestinal illness in 1573, the Monomotapa, via an ambassador, communicated to the remaining Portuguese party that “as to [the matter of] returning to the [Christian] faith, when we went there [to the Mutapa court] he would treat with us upon the subject” (Monclaro 1899). Though the Monomotapa’s enthusiasm for Christianity was tepid at best—he merely committed to speaking with the fathers once they arrived at his court—it seems that the Virgin’s and Silveira’s earlier efforts were not completely in vain, and that perhaps the Virgin’s sweetness was still working upon him. A return to the faith, however, was not in the cards. After years of delays and setbacks, and with only 180 soldiers left in the mission’s party, Monclaro was deflated, and requested to be sent to India, where he thought he might have more success as a missionary (Vila-Santa 2016). Although Barreto’s successor, Vasco Fernandez Homem, stayed in Mozambique for several more years searching for gold and silver mines, in the absence of the Jesuits the mission no longer carried an evangelizing imprimatur (Vila-Santa 2016). Moreover, Homem and the Portuguese never reached the Mutapa court. Wherever the Ecce Homo landed, its purpose, as a gift from one Catholic monarch to another, was moot.

4. Conclusions

Despite the frustrating incompleteness of the mission’s narrative, it is important to examine further the way that Catherine exercised her diplomatic savvy and political power in the framing of her gift. Since the death of her husband, John III, in 1557 and until she resigned from her role as regent for her grandson, Sebastian, in 1562, Catherine was the de facto monarch of Portugal, acting in her own right as a politician and stateswoman. As head of state during the Silveria mission, Catherine would have been aware of its missteps, most likely via reports from Goa, from either the Jesuit Father Provincial (to whom Silveira answered) or from the Portuguese viceroy, Francisco Coutinho. She would have known about Silveira’s refusal of the Monomotapa’s lavish gift of gold, cattle, and servants, a refusal that shocked the Monomotapa (Fróis 1561). Only after the Monomotapa was in the thrall of the Virgin and then baptized so that he could understand her “divine and celestial language” did Silveira relent, accepting the emperor’s gift of cows, which he had slaughtered and distributed to the poor (Fróis 1561).

Here, Silveira initially refuses the gift of the non-Christian Monomotapa, holding out for the greater reward of conversion. He then assumes the role of the giver: the Virgin, a gift to the Monomotapa from Silveira, is able to work her miracle through the missionary’s benefaction. Only after the Monomotapa is able to give as a Christian does Silveria accept his gift of cows, which he immediately gives back to God as alms for the poor. While this strategy of initial refusal ultimately achieved Silveira’s goal of converting the Monomotapa, the strangeness of both Silveira’s behavior (he was a Portuguese who didn’t want gold!) and the Virgin’s (her magic induced the Monomotapa to be baptized, and thus made “subject” to the foreign Silveira) made him vulnerable (Fróis 1561).35 These odd behaviors may have opened the Monomotapa’s ear to the influence of his Muslim advisors, who then further undermined the emperor’s trust in the missionary.

Astutely, Catherine seems to have learned from this tale that it was unwise to engage in a gift exchange between a Christian and non-Christian, and that it was better to give as an equal. Catherine would insulate herself and her representatives from any political chatter accusing her of tricking the Monomotapa into giving away his power. Instead, she would be the giver of a gift to a new royal convert acting of his own volition. Furthermore, key here is the fact that Catherine, not her grandson the king, was enabling the enchainment of the Monomotapa, Sebastian, Philip II, herself, and the indigenous maker of the Ecce Homo. Although she was not initially supportive of the Barreto mission, she nevertheless endeavored to play a significant role once Sebastian was determined to see it through.

This astounding feather image of the Ecce Homo, made by an indigenous Nahua or Purépecha artist for the Spanish king, circulated in the Habsburg family gift-giving network, and then embarked from Almeirim on another great journey. This mission was designed to extend the Habsburgs’ political and spiritual reach (to use the motto of Charles V) plus ultra (further beyond) to Mutapa, a kingdom that Sebastian and Catherine hoped would soon be economically, territorially, and spiritually bound to the worldwide Iberian realms. The metaphor of flight, and the fantasy of extra-human mobility, is bound up in the very materiality of the Ecce Homo: the Christian Holy Spirit arrives in Mozambique in the hands of Portuguese Jesuits, but on the wings of indigenous Mesoamerican fauna, imbued with tonalli. It embodies the Iberian expansion and is charged with the expansion’s “untranslatability”, its continual negotiation of incommensurate ways of being human.