Case Study: The Featherbook
It’s comps time! Or rather, time to slowly comb through an abundance of readings as I desperately annotate them into neat indexes. Although at the moment my focused research has taken the back seat, I am heading to the archives next week to hang out with a few pages from this rad collection in meatspace. After two years of Zoom research, going to the library in-person is putting a spring in my step.
My current research is examining hybridity, extraction and ecological disruption through feather collections of the 17th-century Atlantic World, considering both avian migratory patterns and trade routes. Dionisio Minaggio’s The Feather Book (above), held in the McGill Rare Books Library, offers an extraordinary and beautiful object-insight into the use of feathers as medium and material, and into the burgeoning extraction of birds from the so-called New World. Minaggio, the chief gardener for the Duchy of Milan in Spanish-occupied Lombardy, acts as a kind of early-modern outsider and collage artist, obsessively creating over 150 pages of the glorious Feather Book out of feathers, skin, beaks, and even woodpecker tongues. Although the “book” is collectively dated 1618, it certainly took Minaggio a great number of years to complete. The optical effect of the book is dizzying: a many-paged mosaic of striated dense colours that shift and glimmer according to the light, and which together weave a topography of thousands of barbs. Through the pastiche of feathers, intricate scenes, landscapes, and figures form.
The collection’s contents can be divided into roughly five categories: the birds (113) pages), the hunters (16 pages), the comedians (14 pages), the musicians (8 pages), and the tradesmen (4 pages). The lone outlier to this categorization is a single page that contains neither people nor birds. Instead, in an architectural style that is typical of The Feather Book, it shows a brown-and-gray townscape flecked with bright blue and green feathers and bracketed by an archway of high-reaching branches against a white paper sky. The 156-plates of The Feather Book, now housed in individual glass-frames in the Blackader Library of McGill University, are a collection of remarkable singularity, while simultaneously reflecting themes of hybridity common to 17th-century art: the dichotomies of man and nature, local and global, observed and imagined.
(Prior to being framed by McGill University after acquisition in the 1920s, the pages were housed in a heavy leather box that latched together with a metal clasp. In e-mail correspondence with Rare Books Librarian Lauren Williams (April 21st, 2021), she wrote that she believes the spine has been replaced, and the book was converted into a box at some point, but the rest of the binding is original. She also interestingly mentioned that the glue-substance used by Minaggio is unknown. At some point the pages were tested for arsenic (negative) but the actual substance Minaggio used remains uncertain).
There are so many interesting things about this work that I have yet to write about, and I’m greatly looking forward to continuing to peer over and be inspired by it’s many-feathered pages. I'll be presenting more in-depth research on this piece in Dublin, Ireland at the Renaissance Society of America’s Conference: “Wings and Feathers in Early Modern Art and Thought: Meanings, Media, Materiality” , on 30 March-2 April 2022. More to come as this preoccupation with wings continues.