My name is Ulinka Rublack and I'm a historian interested in renaissance dress.
One of the details I noted that are really new in the 16th century are feather
headdresses. So they're worn by men as much as women and whereas in the 15th
century get occasional feather that is attached to hat, suddenly they're much
more elaborate headdresses and many more feather makers who turn out to be a
specialised craft. So what's interesting is that the custom of wearing feathers
becomes feminised only later in the 17th century but up to then men in the
military but also civilian use were very much in love with feathers and exploring
all different combinations of feathers, different dyes and feathers it was
really an integral part of their clothing ensembles.
The feathers, obviously demand a lot of skill to be worked with and that was what we
investigated but I want to go further and so I cooperated with Jenny Tiramani
the Head Director of The School of Historical Dress and wanted her to
reconstruct the feather headdress worn by Matthäus Schwarz, an accountant of the
Fugger merchant company in Augsburg in the 16th century who left us this
extraordinary sartorial autobiography of 136 images recording what he looked like
and we focused on a feather headdress he's commissioned for 1521 where he
meets Ferdinand of Austria the brother of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V,
who's just been elected in Germany.
So we want to know what skills exactly did it
take to actually manufacture. What would have looked like? This had never been
done before. What was it like to work with ostrich feathers? How would they've
moved? How might they've made a man like
Matthäus Schwarz feel when he moved and what kind of visibility
did he give to him.
We've got basically two completely different elements here
put together. So this, we keep calling it amongst ourselves here at the school we
call this the feather crown. It's a crown of feathers. And it is an entirely
separate piece to the bonnet which is it's almost like a hat band over the
bonnet and we have attached the ostrich feathers to a minimal wire frame. In the
situation on the open field where he wore this, you'd be able to spot him half
a mile away because there wouldn't be anybody wearing an identical headdress.
There's no depiction in the book of clothes of Matthäus Schwarz wearing
this bonnet or this style of bonnet with the feather crown without armour on.
We've sort of put the two together for you to see the effect of the crown of feathers
and the bonnet and a helmet but we wouldn't say that this is a trio that
originally went together in this fashion. So it's we've we kind of balanced it and
we've made it give the impression but it's not very fixed. However I think
we would like Jack to try to move around just so that you can see the kind of
three-dimensional space that this kind of headgear gives him which really
increases a person's... the spectacle a person creates and a person's
prominence in a landscape. So Jack slowly, maybe you could just walk a couple of
steps turn around gently.
1521 was such a signal year also because that is the year when Charles V
brings over the extraordinary feather headdresses and feather clothing
from the Americas that have been collected by Cortese. So Charles V
gifts these two sister to other people who matter
so does Cortese and an artist like Durer saw these in Brussels in that same year
in 1521 and was absolutely amazed about the artistry involved. So we can see here
that through the interest in the Americas but also through the interests
in the Ottoman Empire and all these people have really cultivated the
feather arts as we now think of them, there's a real change in the perception
of them as adornment. This is now really prized by those who have fashion
leaders like Matthäus Schwarz as a subtle craft and we can see through the way
they had to be worked with and just what an ostrich feather looked like, why that
notion of subtility and ingenuity suggested itself so much.
I had no idea before I saw this recreation just of the kind of space this would have taken out up
and commanded of itself and just of the way it created movement and space and
how many hours of labour would have gone into creating a piece of this kind.
And that tells us just how important it was for men like Schwartz to invest in. How
integral it was to their own sense of making a statement about themselves,
positioning themselves socially but also enjoying this new subtle craft.