Page 575 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

THE TUPINAMBA

The ancestors of the Tupinamba migrated to the facts must have made a great impression when 408
coast of what is now Brazil from the interior. they arrived in Europe in the years following
By the sixteenth century they occupied a long the irst Portuguese landing in Brazil in 1500. FEATHER CLOAK
f
strip of coastline along the Atlantic. They were The earliest European depictions of native
a warlike people, and the cannibalism that Americans often show figures dressed in i6th or lyth century
Tupinamba
accompanied their victories was described in feather garments and holding war clubs that cotton or plant fiber, feathers, bird skin
sensational detail in the accounts of early Euro- were clearly inspired by Tupinamba prototypes. 200 x 180 (j8 /4 x yo /s)
7
3
pean explorers. references: Hirtzel 1930, 649-651; Metraux 1932, 7;
The Tupinamba are best known for their Calberg 1939, 103-133; Feest 1985, 243; Hildesheim
beautiful ceremonial capes made of tropical 1987, cat. 357
birds' feathers, a number of which have sur- Musees royaux d'Art et d'Histoire, Brussels
vived in Kunstkammer collections. Their arti-
On special occasions the usually naked Tupinamba
Indians in what is now Brazil adorned themselves
with feathers, which they glued directly onto
their bodies or wore as an ornament. An Indian
cape was recorded in the Kunstkammer of the
king of Denmark in an inventory of 1689, as was a
long Indian cloak of red feathers. These two items
are now in the Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen
(see Dam-Mikkelsen and Lundbaek 1980, 27-28,
nos.EHC52 and £115931, ills). Several other Tupi-
namba cloaks are known: two in Florence and one
each in Basel, Berlin (destroyed during the Second
World War), Paris, and Brussels (Feest 1985, 242-
243). The oldest reference to the feather cloak in
Brussels is in an inventory (1781) of the collec-
tions in the royal arsenal made by Georges Gerard,
a member of the Academic des Sciences et Belles-
Lettres of Brussels. There under no. 70 is
recorded "Une espece d'habillement ou manteau
compose de plumes rouges qu'on dit avoir appar-
tenu a Montesuma (Empereur du Mexique)."
However, this cloak is not Aztec but Tupinamba.
Similar items of costume are well known from
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century descriptions,
the best illustrations being found in Hans Staden's
Warhaftige Historia... der wilden, nacketen,
grimmigen, Menschfresser Leuthen of 1557 and
in Theodor de Bry's engravings. The cloaks were
put on for ceremonies, including human sacri-
fices; according to Claude dAbbeville (1614), the
native Americans wore them not only as adorn-
ments, but also as encitements to bravery ("non
pour cacher seulement leur nudite mais pour se
parer et estre plus braves"), which implies a
magical function (Due 1979-1980, 257-261). The
mantle in Brussels is extremely wide as well as
long, which means that it must have swept the
ground. The backing of the cloak is a net made of
cotton or vegetable fibers into which the feathers
were very carefully fastened. The red feathers are
those of the guara or red ibis (Tantalus ruber L. or
Ibis rubra), the blue and the yellow feathers are
those of the Ara (Ara ararauna), while the
remainder come from Amazonian parrots. Both
technical details (discussed by Calberg 1939) and
the choice of feathers confirm a Brazilian and
more specifically Tupinamba origin. J.M.M.

574 CIRCA 1492