(jazz piano)
- [Voiceover] We're in the National Museum of Anthropology
in Mexico City, looking at an amazingly
beautiful feathered headdress.
- [Voiceover] This is a replica of a feathered headdress
that's currently in the museum in Vienna,
sent to Europe by Hernan Cortes,
the Spanish conquistador who defeated the Aztecs.
- [Voiceover] So, Cortes comes in with his army
of Spanish soldiers, conquers the Aztec people,
and is overwhelmed by the beauty of
much of what he sees, especially these feathered objects,
and sends a lot of them back to Spain to Charles V.
I can see why he would send these objects back.
There's nothing like it in Spain that I can think of.
- [Voiceover] And even though this is a replica,
it gives us a really good sense of what
some of these feather objects would have looked like.
And you have these stunning quetzal tail feathers,
which only come from the male quetzal,
and we see so many of them, and usually
the bird only has two, three tail feathers.
So these come from a lot of different quetzals,
a kind of bird that you find in Central America.
Places like Costa Rica.
So what this is speaking to is the long distance trade
that's happening as well as tribute items
that are sent back to the Aztec capitol of Tenochtitlan.
- [Voiceover] So the Aztecs have an empire
with lots of cities that they've conquered,
and what they exact from those cities
is luxury goods, and that includes feathers,
that includes textiles, cacao, shells,
and they're all coming to the capitol
of the empire, which is actually here
in what is present-day Mexico City,
but was then Tenochtitlan, did I say that right?
- [Voiceover] Almost, Tenochtitlan.
- [Voiceover] So the feathers, we have to imagine,
as part of an entire costume, and in so much
Aztec art, we see not only the feather headdress,
but we see paper ornaments, we see
other kinds of elaborate aspects of costume
that were part of rituals, part of performances.
- [Voiceover] Costume was incredibly important
to the Aztecs, as it was to many Meso-American cultures.
And what's unfortunate for us is we're seeing
this here as a static item.
But imagine feathers with this beautiful iridescence,
shimmering in the light and moving with wind,
and being danced and able to transform
the ruler wearing this into something else entirely.
If you see where you're supposed to place this
on top of your head, and then you see
the extent to which the feathers radiate outwards,
it's almost like your identity becomes
less important than what you're wearing.
- [Voiceover] You're completely subsumed by this costume.
- [Voiceover] And besides these gorgeous quetzal feathers,
what we have here are pure gold ornaments
as well as other colors of feathers
like a beautiful turquoise blue.
- [Voiceover] The people who made this
lived in a special quarter of the capitol.
- [Voiceover] They were called in Nahuatl,
the language of the Aztecs, amanteca, feather workers.
And they were highly regarded, and after
the Spanish conquest when people like Hernan Cortes,
the Spanish conquistador, encountered objects
like this, they were so impressed, that this is
actually a type of artistic production
that doesn't cease with the conquest,
but what we do see is a shift in subject matter.
Instead of say, making ritual headdresses like this,
we see objects that display Christian iconography.
Very close to the feathered headdress
here in the museum, we see a replica of a chalice covering
that is made of feathers, and if we're looking
at the subject matter, it looks very Aztec.
We see water glyphs, and what looks like
a ray of fire and a strange kind of mouth,
or symbols that are very unfamiliar
to us, in other words.
And this is the beginning of a reinterpretation
of Christian iconography using Aztec glyphs.
- [Voiceover] So we have a coming together
of these two cultures, a hybrid art form.
A chalice is something that we see in Christian rituals,
it's the vessel that contained the wine
that becomes the blood of Christ during Mass.
And so this coming together of these two
very different cultures, but Aztec culture
forced to become a Christian culture by the Spanish.
(jazz piano)