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A feather in your cap: inside the symbolic universe of Renaissance Europe

tdk25 — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 08:50:40 +0000

Later, an eyewitness recalled that officials thought the Duchess had fainted at the sight of blood trickling from her husband’s mouth. Only the Archduke himself seemed to realise that she, too, had been hit. “Sophie dear! Don’t die! Stay alive for our children!” Franz Ferdinand pleaded. Then, “he seemed to sag down himself,” the witness remembered. “His plumed general’s hat… fell off; many of its green feathers were found all over the car floor.”

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914, had such seismic repercussions in precipitating the First World War that it is easy to disregard the curious little detail of feathers on the floor. In such context, they seem trivial. Rewind a few moments more, to the famous final photograph of the couple leaving Sarajevo town hall, and the plumage sprouting from the Archduke’s hat looks positively absurd; as if amid all the other mortal perils of that day – the bomb that narrowly missed his car, the bullets from a semi-automatic – he somehow also sustained a direct hit from a large bird.

Today, we generally associate feathers with women’s fashion, and a peculiarly ostentatious brand at that, reserved for Royal Ascot, high-society weddings and hen parties. Among men, wearing feathers is typically seen as provocatively effete – the domain of drag queens, or ageing, eyelinered devotees of the Manic Street Preachers.

Yet a cursory glance at military history shows that Franz Ferdinand was far from alone in his penchant for plumage. The Bersaglieri of the Italian Army, for example, still wear capercaillie feathers in their hats, while British fusiliers have a clipped plume called a hackle. Cavaliers in the English Civil War adorned their hats with ostrich feathers.

“Historically, feathers were an incredibly expressive accessory for men,” observes ��Ī historian Professor Ulinka Rublack. “Nobody has really looked at why this was the case. That’s a story that I want to tell.”

Rublack is beginning to study the use of featherwork in early modern fashion as part of a project called ‘Materialized Identities’, a collaboration between the Universities of ��Ī, Basel and Bern, and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

To the outsider, its preoccupations (her co-researchers are studying gold, glass and veils) might seem surprising. Yet such materials are not just mute artefacts; they sustained significant economies, craft expertise and, she says, “entered into rich dialogue with the humans who processed and used them”. Critically, they elicited emotions, moods and attitudes for both the wearer and the viewer. In this sense, they belonged to the ‘symbolic universe’ of communities long since dead. If we can understand such resonances, we come closer to knowing more about how it felt to be a part of that world.

Rublack has spotted that something unusual started to happen with feathers during the 16th century. In 1500, they were barely worn at all; 100 years later they had become an indispensable accessory for the Renaissance hipster set on achieving a ‘gallant’ look.

In prosperous trading centres, the locals started sporting hats bedecked with feathers from parrots, cranes and swallows. Headgear was manufactured so that feathers could be inserted more easily. By 1573, Plantin’s Flemish–French dictionary was even obliged to offer words to describe people who chose not to wear them, recommending such verbiage as: ‘the featherless’ and ‘unfeathered’.

Featherworking became big business. From Prague and Nuremberg to Paris and Madrid, people started to make a living from decorating feathers for clothing. Impressive efforts went into dyeing them. A 1548 recipe recommends using ashes, lead monoxide and river water to create a ‘very beautiful’ black, for example.

Why this happened will become clearer as the project develops. One crucial driver, however, was exploration – the discovery of new lands, especially in South America. Compared with many of the other species that early European colonists encountered, exotic birds could be captured, transported and kept with relative ease. Europe experienced a sudden ‘bird-craze’, as birds such as parrots became a relatively common sight on the continent’s largest markets.

Given the link with new territories and conquest, ruling elites wore feathers partly to express their power and reach. But there were also more complex reasons. In 1599, for example, Duke Frederick of Württemberg held a display at his court at which he personally appeared as ‘Lady America’, wearing a costume covered in exotic feathers. This was not just a symbol of power, but of cultural connectedness, Rublack suggests: “The message seems to be that he was embracing the global in a duchy that was quite insular and territorial.”

Nor were feathers worn by the powerful alone. In 1530, a legislative assembly at Augsburg imposed restrictions on peasants and burghers adopting what it clearly felt should be an elite fashion. The measure did not last, perhaps because health manuals of the era recommended feathers as protecting the wearer from ‘bad’ air – cold, miasma, damp or excessive heat – all of which were regarded as hazardous. During the 1550s, Eleanor of Toledo had hats made from peacock feathers to protect her from the rain.

Gradually, feathers came to indicate that the wearer was healthy, civilised and cultured. Artists and musicians took to wearing them as a mark of subtlety and style. “They have a certain tactility that was seen to signal an artistic nature,” Rublack says.

Like most fads, this enthusiasm eventually wore off. By the mid-17th century, feathers were out of style, with one striking exception. Within the armies of Europe what was now becoming a ‘feminine’ fashion choice elsewhere remained an essential part of military costume.

Rublack thinks that there may have been several reasons for this strange contradiction. “It’s associated with the notion of graceful warfaring,” she says. “This was a period when there were no standing armies and it was hard to draft soldiers. One solution was to aestheticise the military, to make it seem graceful and powerful, rather than simply about killing.” Feathers became associated with the idea of an art of warfare.

They were also already a part of military garb among both native American peoples and those living in lands ruled by the Ottomans. Rublack believes that just as some of these cultures treated birds as gods, and therefore saw feathers as having a protective quality, European soldiers saw them as imparting noble passions, bravery and valiance.

In time, her research may therefore reveal a tension about the ongoing use of feathers in this unlikely context. “It has to do with a notion of masculinity achieved both through brutal killing, and the proper conduct of war as art,” she says. But, as she also notes, she is perhaps the first historian to have spotted the curious emotional resonance of feathers in military fashion at all. All this shows a sea-change in methodologies: historians now chart the ways in which our identities are shaped through deep connections with ‘stuff’. Further work is needed to understand how far these notions persisted by 1914 when, in his final moments, Franz Ferdinand left feathers scattered across the car floor.

Inset image: Hendrick Goltzius, soldier, c. 1580; credit: The Rijsmuseum, Amsterdam.

Today, feathers are an extravagant accessory in fashion; 500 years ago, however, they were used to constitute culture, artistry, good health and even courage in battle. This unlikely material is now part of a project that promises to tell us more not only about what happened in the past, but also about how it felt to be there.

Historically, feathers were an incredibly expressive accessory for men. Nobody has really looked at why this was the case. That’s a story that I want to tell.

Ulinka Rublack

Achille Beltrame

Assassination of the feather-hatted Archduke Franz Ferdinand

The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Why does the kingfisher have blue feathers?

amb206 — Wed, 12 Aug 2015 08:43:53 +0000

Scroll to the end of the article to listen to the podcast.

Kingfishers are notoriously shy. But one of the best places to spot them in ��Ī is the Botanic Garden where they perch in the swamp cypresses to fish in the lake.

The brilliantly bright plumage of the kingfisher looks almost exotic in comparison to the more modest hues of many birds native to Britain. In motion, the kingfisher’s contrasting colours – orange, cyan and blue – produce a startling flash of colour.

Colour in nature is a fascinating topic. Understanding why and how plants and animals produce and employ colour requires researchers to collaborate and share their expertise across different disciplines. Dr Silvia Vignolini (Department of Chemistry) has been working with Professors Jeremy Baumberg (Department of Physics) and Beverley Glover (Department of Plant Sciences) to look at the extraordinarily clever ways in which nature makes spectacular colour effects.

Blue is a favourite colour of people around the world. But the production of intense blue presents challenges to nature. Most vertebrates are unable to produce blue pigment. The orange of kingfisher plumage is the product of tiny pigment granules but its cyan and blue feathers contain no pigments. These colours are ‘structural’. They are created by the intricate structural arrangement of a transparent material which, depending on its precise make-up and thickness compared to the tiny wavelength of light, produces a range of colours by ‘incident light’ – in other words light shining on the sample.

Structural colours feature in plants too – particularly in fruit and flowers. In research published in 2012, Vignolini and others revealed that an African plant called the Pollia condensata produces a blue fruit, which produces a strikingly shiny blue fruit. The researchers discovered that the Pollia fruit reflects back 30% of the light cast on it. Furthermore, its reflective properties stand the test of time in a remarkable way: a Pollia fruit, locked in a seed drawer at Kew Gardens for 100 years, had lost none of its blueness.

The way in which plants like the Pollia achieve extraordinarily bright and long-lasting colours offers huge scope for material science. Vignolini says: “Cellulose, which is the main material used by this plant to produce colour, can also be manipulated in vitro to obtain a similar optical effect. By controlling the self-assembly process of cellulose, it is therefore possible to produce bio-mimetic colouration without using any toxic pigment.”

Because structural colours can be so intense, their origin in only transparent materials is hard to imagine. Vignolini uses the example of a soap bubble. “If you start from a perfectly transparent water-soap suspension and you blow a soap bubble, you can observe all the colours of the rainbow. These colours cannot be the results of pigmentation, because the liquid is transparent. Instead, the colours result from creating a very thin layer, just a few hundreds of nanometres thick, of the suspension that interacts with light.” she says.

“A plant or animal cell does something similar. Using simple sugars, it creates a multi-layered nano-structure that optimises the reflection of the blue colour. Understanding these incredibly precise processes is the key to be able to copy and mimic these materials.”

In a paper published in 2011, Dr Bodo Wilts (formerly ��Ī, now University of Fribourg) and colleagues focused on the striking plumage of the kingfisher. They found that the cyan and blue barbs of its feathers contain spongy nanostructures with varying dimensions, causing the light to reflect differently and thus produce the observed set of colours. The subtle differences within colours are produced by tiny variations in the structure of the barbs.

Kingfisher feathers reflect light in a way that scientists describe as semi-iridescent. The feathers of peacocks and birds of paradise are truly iridescent. Iridescence is produced by the ways in which layers of material are perfectly aligned and repeated periodically to achieve a shimmer effect. Semi-iridescence is produced when the layers are not quite perfectly aligned but slightly disrupted, thus causing a smaller span of iridescent colour.

There’s much more to be discovered about colour in nature. “Researchers are beginning to learn more about birds’ vision. This work will help us to grasp how they see colour and how they respond to it. To unlock the secret of how cellulose or keratin make fabulously bright colour will involve continuing collaborations between biologists, physicists and materials scientists, ” says Vignolini.

The kingfisher is just one of 100 bird species to be seen in the Botanic Garden which provides an important habitat for birds and other wildlife in the heart of ��Ī. Among them is the increasingly rare song thrush. Mistle thrushes, too, can often be seen in winter atop trees full of mistletoe. The Garden also has thriving populations of great and blue tits while flocks of long-tailed tits are often heard as they fly from tree to tree to search for food. Summer visitors regularly include a pair of sparrowhawks and flocks of swifts.

Next in the ��Ī Animal Alphabet: L is for a creature that has helped archaeologists learn more about the life of people inhabiting the remote and windswept Isle of Oronsay 6,000 years ago.

Have you missed the series so far? Catch up on Medium here.

Inset images: Kingfisher (Gilberto Pereira); The common kingfisher, Alcedo atthis, and its three main feather types: orange feathers at the breast, cyan feathers at the back and blue feathers at the tail (Doekele Stavenga, Jan Tinbergen, Hein Leertouwer, Bodo Wilts); Scanning electron micrographs (SEMs) of sectioned barbs of breast and tail feathers (Doekele Stavenga, Jan Tinbergen, Hein Leertouwer, Bodo Wilts); Close up of a cut vacuole and the surrounding spongy structures (Doekele Stavenga, Jan Tinbergen, Hein Leertouwer, Bodo Wilts).

The ��Ī Animal Alphabet series celebrates ��Ī's connections with animals through literature, art, science and society. Here, K is for Kingfisher. Look out for them among the swamp cypresses at the Botanic Garden, where the secrets behind their cyan and blue feathers are being studied by an extraordinary collaboration of scientists.

Understanding these incredibly precise processes is the key to be able to copy and mimic these materials

Silvia Vignolini

Fitzwilliam Museum

Detail of Kingfisher, woodblock printed in colour, Kitagawa Utamaro

The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Birds of a feather display only a fraction of possible colours

gm349 — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 07:09:09 +0000

Contrary to our human perception of bird coloration as extraordinarily diverse, a new study reports that bird plumages exhibit only a small fraction (less than a third) of the possible colours birds can observe.

Early lineages of living birds probably produced an even smaller range of colours, but the evolution of innovative pigments and structural (or optical) colours has allowed many birds to create more diverse and colourful plumages over time.

Researchers from the ��Ī and Yale University applied a mathematical model of bird vision to estimate the full range – or gamut – of avian plumage coloration and to explore how feather colours changed over the course of evolution.

Mary Caswell Stoddard of the ��Ī’s Department of Zoology explained: “Birds are among the most colourful organisms on the planet. To our human eyes, birds seem to possess almost every colour imaginable – but birds see the world very differently than we do.”

Birds have an additional colour cone in their retinas that is sensitive to ultraviolet light, which allows them to see many colours invisible to humans.

Stoddard and co-author Richard Prum of Yale University measured hundreds of plumage colours and analyzed them in a tetrachromatic colour space, which combines raw information about the light feathers reflect with details about the colours birds can see. They found that bird plumage colours fall far short of filling the colour space, leaving vast regions unoccupied.

“Just as a newspaper can only print a fraction of the colours we humans can see, bird feathers can only produce a subset of colours that are theoretically visible to other birds,” said Stoddard. “The intriguing part is thinking about why plumage colours are confined to this subset. Out-of-gamut colours may be impossible to make with available mechanisms, or they may be disadvantageous.”

Over evolutionary time, novel coloration mechanisms have evolved in different groups of birds, allowing their plumages to become more colourful.

Prum stated: “Evolutionary innovations in the form of new pigments and structural colours enabled birds to colonize new areas of avian colour space. In the same way, human clothing was pretty drab before the invention of aniline dyes like mauve, but chemical inventions allowed clothing to become more diverse in colour. Our study documents the history of mechanistic constraints on bird colour diversity.”

Bird plumages may only represent a fraction of bird-visible colours, but how colourful are they compared to other objects in the natural world? For comparison, the researchers analyzed an extensive set of flower colours as seen by birds. They determined that bird feather colours rival the diversity of plant coloration and have achieved some striking colours unattainable by flowers.

“To explore the limits and possibilities of bird coloration is a thrilling venture, and we have much yet to discover,” said Stoddard.

Their findings are reported today, 23 June, in the journal Behavioral Ecology.

Research reveals plumages exhibit less than a third of possible colours birds can see.

Birds are among the most colourful organisms on the planet. To our human eyes, birds seem to possess almost every colour imaginable – but birds see the world very differently than we do.

Mary Caswell Stoddard of the ��Ī’s Department of Zoology

David Kjaer

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

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�������������Ī - feathers

A feather in your cap: inside the symbolic universe of Renaissance Europe

Why does the kingfisher have blue feathers?

Birds of a feather display only a fraction of possible colours

��Ī - feathers