106 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
figure 1.11). 26 This “aviary” may have been not a pleasure
garden, but a holding pen for the most exotic birds to be
used in featherworks. The Florentine offers another clue for
locating the feather workshops in the city, saying that the
featherworkers and the temple to their tutelary deity clus-
tered in a neighborhood called Amatlan. Colonial records
reveal no district named Amatlan in Mexico-Tenochtitlan,
but a closely related name is that of Amanalco, which sat a
few blocks to the southwest of San Francisco. 27 This would
have mattered little to its intended recipient, the pope, but
for its patrons, this featherwork may have been intimately
connected to the new urban geography that was emerging
in the southwest of the city. Within these feather work-
shops, elite featherworkers registered expansive creative
agendas, well known in other works of early colonial art,
where, within the framework provided by Christian ico-
nography, they created works that were meaningful within
older visual systems and material hierarchies.
The framing text begins with the name of Pope Paul
III (r. 1534–1549), and while the text could be interpreted
as a simple statement of papal domain over Mexico, it is
more likely that the featherwork was intended as a gift,
because it was sent to Europe at some point and is now in
a European collection; scholars suspect it never reached its
intended recipient. 28 Nonetheless, affixing his name to the
frame of the sacred image, setting it opposite to that of the
pope, Huanitzin also showed his embrace of Christianity,
a testament of indigenous acceptance of the faith in the
patronage of a work that adhered to orthodox iconography.
It is useful, also, to situate this work among other gifts
sent to Europe traceable to Mexica leaders. Before the
Conquest, as we saw in chapter 3, Mexica leaders often
impressed lesser leaders through asymmetrical gifting, that
is, presenting an inferior with a work he would be unable
to reciprocate and thereby giving a public and social face to
an otherwise intangible power relationship. At the time of
the Conquest, Moteuczoma II, Huanitzin’s father-in-law,
engaged in such asymmetrical gifting on a number of occa-
sions: upon hearing of the arrivals of the foreigners upon
the Veracruz coast, he sent shields and featherworks, as
well as a great “sun” of beaten gold and a “moon” of silver. 29
These gifts, in turn, were sent by Cortés to Charles V as
evidence of Moteuczoma’s subservience; once in Europe,
they took on different meaning, becoming a measure of the
extraordinary riches that a conquest, if successful, would
yield. When witnessed by the artist Albrecht Dürer in
1520 as they were displayed in Brussels, he saw them as an
indication of exotic craftsmanship, writing that “amongst
them [were] wonderful works of art, and I marveled at the
subtle ingenia of men in foreign lands.” 30
In their original Mexica framework, however, such
extravagant gifts were gestures of excessiveness, meant in
native terms to overwhelm the recipient, such goods mate-
rializing social relations in acts of competitive generosity. 31
In describing an earlier act of gifting to the Mexica huei
tlatoani from the equally powerful ruler of Tetzcoco, Neza-
hualcoyotl, the Dominican historian Diego Durán wrote,
“Nezahualcoyotl offered gifts: these were according to the
position of the giver and that of the person for whom they
were destined, and although the Relación, the written his-
tory [Durán’s source for the information, also called the
Crónica X], does not mention this, these presents were
never less than gold jewelry, precious stones, ear ornaments,
lip plugs, exquisite featherwork, shields, weapons, man-
tles, and beautifully worked breechcloths.” 32 The Durán
account first and foremost emphasizes the gift as a reflec-
tion of the giver, as well as revealing that the featherwork
would have been among the expected items in such an elite
gift. As such, the gifting of The Mass of Saint Gregory was an
asymmetrical exchange, as the pope, as far as we know, had
sent nothing to Huanitzin, and certainly nothing of such
value and artistry. Huanitzin proclaimed his patronage in
his name set boldly at the bottom of the frame.
The choice of a feathered work was not insignificant,
especially one in which the thousands of tiny feathers were
set on the surface to create, on one hand, the broad shim-
mering field of blue that creates the background, and on
the other, the detailed parts of the image, like Gregory’s
surprised fingers, or the downward cast of Christ’s eyes.
The anthropologist Alfred Gell has discussed the “captiva-
tion” that such images exert on their viewers in the follow-
ing terms:Where [works are] . . . made with technical expertise and
imagination of a high order, which exploit the intrinsic
mechanisms of visual cognition with subtle psychologi-
cal insight, then we are dealing with . . . artifacts which
announce themselves as miraculous creations. The “coming
into being” of these objects is explicitly attended to, because
their power partly rests on the fact that their origination is
inexplicable except as a magical, supernatural, occurrence.The attention that viewers pay to the miraculous artifact,
Gell continues, “traps” them in a “logical bind” between