1673 Engraving of Aztec Men in Feathered Dress
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of Aztec men in feathered dress appears in this excerpted leaf from the New Spain section of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
Before an arched building, a tall man crowned with feathers gestures with an arrow toward three seated companions, one of whom tends a smoking bowl beside a strung bow and a quiver of arrows. Their dress follows almost point for point the description of Aztec costume set beneath the image, from crowns of red feathers topped with tall plumes and feather collars broad enough to cover the shoulders to paired armbands, white hip cloths, and rings of plaited feathers below the knee. Just above that passage, the text closes an account of a festival in which a dough figure of the god was broken and shared among the people. The reverse turns to the ointment Aztec priests compounded from spiders, scorpions and snakes, to marriage rites in which the couple's garments were knotted together, and to the feast of Toxcatl held in honor of Tezcatlipoca.
Arnoldus Montanus (ca. 1625–1683), a Dutch minister and schoolmaster, compiled De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld from earlier chronicles and travel accounts without ever crossing the Atlantic. The Amsterdam publisher Jacob van Meurs issued it in 1671 with a wealth of engravings. John Ogilby's English adaptation followed the same year, and Die Unbekante Neue Welt, the German edition attributed to Olfert Dapper, followed in 1673. Its illustrations were drawn by artists who had mostly never seen the Americas either. They mix reported detail with European invention, and they shaped how a generation of European readers pictured the New World.
CONDITION
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