A shimmering saint, St. John in featherwork


Saint John the Evangelist, 17th century, feather mosaic and paper on copper (Collection of Daniel Liebsohn, loaned to Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City)


Additional resources

Read more about New Spain

Read more about featherworks from New Spain

Learn more about Mexica featherwork

Teresa Castelló Yturbide and Manuel Cortina Portilla, The Art of Featherwork in Mexico (Mexico: Fomento Cultural Banamex, A.C., 1993).

Alessandra Russo, Gerhard Wolf, and Diana Fane, eds., Images take flight: Feather art in Mexico and Europe 1400–1700 (Munich: Hirmer, 2015).

Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, “Featherwork,” in Clothing the New World Church: Liturgical Textiles of Spanish America, 1520–1820, 1st ed. (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), pp. 115–74.

Cite this page as: Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank and Dr. Beth Harris, "A shimmering saint, St. John in featherwork," in Smarthistory, January 24, 2022, accessed March 18, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/a-shimmering-saint-st-john-in-featherwork/.