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A Fledgling Baroque: Featherworks from New Spain in Counter-Reformation Europe

by Rachel Kline

Throughout the sixteenth century, Spanish clergy and nobility acquired hundreds of featherworks crafted by the Indigenous artists of New Spain, which arrived on merchant ships in major European port cities from Antwerp to Seville. The artistic tradition of featherwork, or amantecayotl, among the Mexica people of New Spain predated the conquest of Tenochtitlán but was preserved by the Spanish colonists who commissioned Indigenous artists to create Catholic images in the art form. At once objects of Mexica cultural affirmation and evidence of conquest and conversion, sixteenth-century featherworks represented the Spanish possession of the Americas and bridged the impossible distance of empire for collectors who sought to construct a cosmopolitan self-image. European viewers were enthralled by their inexplicability as objects of both human artifice and natural creation so distinct from the mimetic painting of the late Renaissance. Within the context of the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent’s (1545–1563) reaffirmation of the role of images in religious practice, featherworks emerge as a non-western influence on the European Baroque, which harnessed the political valence of affect in service of the Catholic Church. By examining Mexican featherworks through a decolonial lens, this paper proposes a thread linking the affective splendor of arts indigenous to the Central Mexican Valley to the emergent Baroque style of Counter-Reformation Europe.

One of the earliest featherworks to arrive in Europe was the pre-Hispanic Ahuitzotl Shield, now in the imperial collections in Vienna (fig. 1).¹ Dating to the early sixteenth century, the featherwork shield was crafted by skilled artists known as amantecas, who were trained in the art of amantecayotl. Called chimalli by the Mexica, these featherwork shields were often used in ritual performances and were particularly valued for the ways in which the image crafted from feathers responded to the vibrant effects of ambient light, granting them an affective power.² Often received as tribute to the Aztec Emperor, or tlatoani, extravagantly decorated featherwork shields can also be read as material manifestations of the tlatoani’s authority to extract luxury resources from subordinate groups.³ The amantecas created these featherwork objects by cutting feathers into minuscule pieces and applying them to a blank surface with a natural adhesive in a similar technique to arranging mosaics.⁴ The feathers themselves were acquired by the pochtecas who traveled far distances into Central America to obtain them from the quetzal bird and other species not native to the Central Mexican Valley.⁵ As a result, featherwork objects, or amantecayotl, embodied the reach of the Aztec Empire, which wielded economic and political power over neighboring regions from which the feathers originated. The function of featherworks as an imperial signifier for the Aztecs would later be appropriated by the Spanish conquistadores who sought to convey their own imperial aspirations.

Beginning in the sixteenth century, Indigenous artists were commissioned by the Spanish clergy and colonial elites to depict Catholic imagery using the featherwork medium, thereby resulting in the creation of complex objects situated between different cultural systems of representation. While featherworks bearing religious imagery have commonly been interpreted as signs of European domination of the Mexica, the Spanish appropriation of a traditional indigenous medium for their most sacred works of devotional art speaks to a more nuanced relationship of power.⁶ In this reading of the featherworks, we can identify a system of artistic representation and symbolic meaning which would not be completely erased even in the face of Spanish conquest and conversion. Although the Spaniards chose to preserve the medium of featherwork and appropriate it for their own devotional arts, we can consider the skillfulness of Indigenous artists, the adaptability of Catholic images, and the dual coding of indigenous and European meaning as primary reasons why featherwork endured.⁷

The reception of featherworks from New Spain in Europe determined the impact they would have on the artistic practice and discourse of the Counter-Reformation as an era of stylistic transformation. The bewilderment that ensued upon the arrival of featherworks highlights the intensity of responses that these objects elicited.⁸ Created in Michoacán by the Indigenous artist Juan Batista Cuiris at the end of the sixteenth century, the featherwork pendants Jesus at the Age of Twelve (fig. 2) and Weeping Virgin (fig. 3) embody the astonishing optical effects that fascinated European viewers. Both figures are encircled by a shimmering turquoise background of hummingbird feathers, which appear both blue and green due to the effect of light on the surface of the feather fragments.⁹ The sacred quality of these images is indebted to the medium, which, through the chromatic vibrations of hummingbird feathers, breathes life into the figures of the Virgin and Christ. Building on Brendan McMahon’s argument that the “chromatic instability of colonial Mexican featherwork” transformed the visual experience of images in early modern Europe, we should reconsider their reception in the context of European stylistic developments.¹⁰ The green and blue hues of iridescent featherwork shift and change depending on the angle of both the viewer and the light source, and therefore they became enmeshed in artistic discourse about the affective capabilities of visual experience.¹¹ In this way, featherwork images differed from the static medium of oil paint and entered into the vibrant debates surrounding the artistic imitation of nature and the wonders of the natural world. As such, the bewilderment of European viewers upon seeing Mexican featherworks can be explained not just by the objects’ embodiment of an exotic location, but by their connection to an intellectual discourse about “the illusory nature of the material world itself.”¹²

These decolonial reconsiderations about the reception of featherworks in early modern Europe share a concern for both the agency of the Indigenous artist whose skillful work captivated European audiences and the contributions of Latin America to intellectual discourse and artistic production across sixteenth-century Europe. The canon of early modern art should include objects like Batista Cuiris’s featherworks because of documented evidence that they were considered sophisticated art objects even by European artists themselves. In 1520, the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer traveled to Brussels to meet with Emperor Charles V regarding his pension. While in Brussels, Dürer saw the exhibition of Cortés’s gifts to Charles V, which included a large inventory of Aztec metalwork, textiles, and most likely featherwork.¹³ Upon viewing these objects, Dürer recorded in his journal: “I have never in my life seen anything that gave my heart such delight as these things for I saw in them the subtle ingeniousness of people in foreign lands. I cannot find words to describe all those things I found there.”¹⁴

This encounter between a Renaissance master and Aztec art is remarkable in and of itself, but the most significant aspect of Dürer’s testimony is his ascription of ingenium to the Indigenous artists of New Spain. Ingenium, or the innate quality of genius, was an early modern term attributed only to the most skilled painters, sculptors, and architects. Dürer’s inclusion of this terminology in his journal as he recalled the objects he saw that day demonstrates the affective power of New Spanish arts in the European imagination. Far from being described as exotic or primitive, the objects Cortés shipped back to the Holy Roman Empire were lauded as objects crafted by artists gifted with ingenium. However, it should be noted that while Dürer’s claim demonstrates that he perceived the makers of these objects quite differently than the dehumanizing conquistadores, it remains unclear how he viewed Indigenous artists in relation to himself, as the Aztec objects he witnessed may have fallen outside the bounds of a Renaissance definition of art, which privileged painting, sculpture, and graphic works.

Though Dürer’s Wing of a Blue Roller predates his trip to Brussels, it becomes impossible to view without imagining the influence of Aztec featherworks on the artist’s detailed description of the miraculously vibrant bird wing (fig. 4). Although there is no explicit evidence that Dürer ever drew the marvelous featherworks from New Spain that he experienced in Brussels, unpacking the social life of his Wing of a Blue Roller points to a likely linkage between the two art forms.¹⁵ Regardless, the interest in and relationship between featherworks and the hyper-realism of Dürer’s nature study helps us to imagine the ways in which arts from New Spain entered and impacted the intellectual discourse surrounding European art during the sixteenth century.

Wing of a Blue Roller was acquired by Emperor Rudolf II to be displayed in his Kunstkammer at Prague Castle, which also housed Juan Batista Cuiris’s featherwork pendants of the Virgin and Christ.¹⁶ As a great patron of the arts and sciences, Rudolf II was intensely interested in natural curiosities and what Brendan McMahon has described as contingent images, or “ambiguous pictures with unstable perception.”¹⁷ We can theorize that Rudolf paired Bautista Cuiris’s featherworks with Dürer’s watercolor not only because of their associations with birds, but also because they would have provoked humanistic discourse surrounding the capacity for art to imitate or even surpass nature.

The Kunstkammer of Rudolf II was organized into the dual categories of artificialia and naturalia, with man-made objects and items collected from nature being cataloged separately but not necessarily displayed in this manner.¹⁸ However, the featherwork’s natural medium, combined with human intellectual talent, disrupts the binary of Rudolf’s system of classification and therefore represents an object of exceptional curiosity. The natural medium of hummingbird feathers would have been understood by European viewers as secondary to the featherworks’ function as devotional works of art. Further, the astonishing optical effects of Bautista Cuiris’s featherworks could make even the hyper-naturalistic watercolor by Dürer appear mute and static. The hummingbird feathers’ chromatic instability combined with the breathtaking arrangement of color would have perhaps appealed more to Rudolf II who, in prefiguring the Baroque emphasis on the spectacular, was himself captivated by the wondrous things the world had to offer. Unlike the Renaissance, in which the most mesmerizing art was that which could imitate the ancients, the Counter-Reformation era ushered in a focus on affective, bewildering images that existed beyond the realm of intellectual or artistic explanation.

Isabel Yaya has demonstrated the desire amongst collectors to possess marvelous objects from the Americas and maintains that during the Counter-Reformation, “there was also a turning away from the classical standards of beauty towards an emphasis on the atypical work of nature and the abnormal.”¹⁹ The practice of collecting objects of exotica in the late sixteenth century aligned with the humanistic pursuit of compiling the macrocosm of the world within the microcosm of the Kunstkammer, yet also implicated the European elite in the process of American colonization.²⁰ While featherworks indeed embodied the far-flung colony of New Spain, they also promoted the growing interest among collectors and connoisseurs in the marvelous, which would ultimately lead to the stylistic shift towards the spectacular image in the Baroque era.

In reaffirming the centrality of images to Catholic worship, the Council of Trent in 1563 and the later Counter-Reformation movement introduced the political valence of affect.²¹ Indeed, an entire genre of art rooted in the promotion of the sensuous as inherent to the practice of worship arose following the Council of Trent.²² The responses of bewilderment that followed the introduction of featherworks into Europe predate the profoundly sensuous devotional images of the Counter-Reformation, yet their reception by Dürer speaks to a longstanding impact. Claire Farago has theorized about the significant contributions of Latin American art to the intellectual landscape of Counter-Reformation Europe and argues that “non-European art may have contributed to the theoretical and critical discussions of western art, which never directly mentioned their existence.”²³ Through documentary and visual evidence, the proposed thread linking featherworks to the emergent Baroque style of the Counter-Reformation has amplified the influence of Latin America and Indigenous artists on the stylistic transformation of European art.

Within the context of the Counter-Reformation, featherworks illustrated the power of spectacular images to captivate the viewer, as Europeans remarked upon the mesmerizing inexplicability of featherworks as objects of human artifice and marvels of the natural world. Predating the European Baroque movement by more than fifty years, featherworks breathed new life into the artistic and intellectual discourses surrounding the role of the image and the wonders of nature. Through this artistic influence, perhaps featherworks can be situated within an emergent Baroque aesthetic, which valued the marvelous, sensuous qualities so inherent to the affective capabilities of featherworks. Therefore, by crediting the Indigenous makers of featherworks as contributors to a period of European stylistic transformation, this paper has sought to reaffirm the active role of Indigenous Americans in the making and remaking of the visual culture of the early modern world.

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Rachel Kline is a third-year PhD student in the History of Art & Architecture at Boston University specializing in the Italian Renaissance. With a background in anthropology, she hopes to use this perspective to explore the cultural meanings acquired by art objects and their materials circulating in the Renaissance. Rachel is especially interested in the artistic exchange between Italy and Northern Europe during the fifteenth century.

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Footnotes

1. The shield was given by Hernán Cortés to the Bishop of Palencia, Don Pedro Ruiz de la Mota in his shipment sent from New Spain in 1522. Alessandra Russo, The Untranslatable Image: A Mestizo History of the Arts in New Spain, 1500–1600 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 28.

2. Alessandra Russo has suggested that for the Mexica people prior to Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century, featherworks were linked to the religious practice of sacrifice and the accompanying ritual performances. Alessandra Russo, “Recomposing the Image: Presents and Absents in the Mass of St. Gregory, Mexico-Tenochtitlan, 1539,” in Synergies: Creating Art in Joined Culture, eds. Manuela De Giorgi, Annette Hoffmann, Nicola Suthor (Florence: Kunsthistorisches Institut-Max Planck, 2012), 467. Additionally, Diane Fane has argued that the ways in which light and color interacted on the surface of the featherwork medium granted the chimalli an affective power. Diana Fane, “Feathers, Jade, Turquoise, and Gold,” in Images Take Flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe (1400–1700), eds. Alessandra Russo, Gerhard Wolf, and Diane Fane (Munich: Hirmer, 2015), 103.

3.  See Alessandra Russo, "Cortes's Objects and the Idea of New Spain: Inventories as Spatial Narratives," Journal of the History of Collections 23, no. 2 (2011): 18.

4. Alessandra Russo, “A Contemporary Art from New Spain,” in Images Take Flight, 30. 

5. The pochtecas were a class of long-distance merchants in pre-Hispanic Tenochtitlán who traveled as far as the southwestern United States and Central America to acquire precious goods for the imperial capital. See Deborah L. Nichols, “Farm to Market in the Aztec Imperial Economy,” in Rethinking the Aztec Economy, eds. Deborah L. Nichols, Frances F. Berdan, and Michael Ernst (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017), 19–43.

6. Thomas Cummins has argued that featherworks depicting Catholic subject matter were primarily evidence of successful conversion of the Mexica by the Spanish. In reference to one of the first featherworks to be made with Catholic imagery, he maintains that “the feather painting of the Mass of Saint Gregory was thus intended as more than a material gift; it was an early sign of the conversion of the Mexicans, and proof that they were capable of a profound understanding of the mysteries of Christianity.” See Thomas Cummins, “To Serve Man: Pre-Columbian Art, Western Discourses of Idolatry, and Cannibalism,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 42 (2002): 116.

7. In Reframing the Renaissance, Claire Farago calls for a methodological approach to Renaissance art which considers the exterior factors of artistic influence and asks, “What would the history of the Renaissance look like if cultural interaction and exchange, and the conditions of reception, became our primary concern?” This type of decolonial methodology that aims to re-examine the visual culture of the Renaissance has informed my approach to the reception of featherworks in Counter-Reformation Europe. Claire J. Farago, “Introduction,” in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650, ed. Claire Farago (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 8.

8. At the Debate of Valladolid (1550–1551), Bartolomé de Las Casas argued in support of the humanity of Indigenous Americans by citing their artistic capabilities. Las Casas articulated how the bewildering effect of featherworks convinced him of the rights of the Indigenous to sovereignty and even placed featherworks on the same level as contemporary European painting. In his Apologética Historia Sumaria he wrote: "But what certainly seems to exceed all human inventiveness, and which all the nations of the world will find not just curious but entirely novel, and all the more worthy of admiration and esteem, is the art that those Mexican people know how to make so perfectly, of creating with natural feathers with their own natural colors everything that they and all other excellent and first-rate painters are capable of painting with brushes." Bartolomé de Las Casas, Apologética Historia Sumaria, book III, LXII, 323–325, qtd. in Alessandra Russo, The Untranslatable Image, 85.

9. Feathers from the violetear hummingbird were increasingly used in featherworks postconquest because the species of bird was native to Mexico and the Spanish conquest had disrupted previous long-distance trade networks which imported feathers to Tenochtitlán from the rainforests of Central America. See Brendan C. McMahon, "Contingent Images: Looking Obliquely at Colonial Mexican Featherwork in Early Modern Europe," The Art Bulletin 103, no. 2 (2021): 29.

10. Brendan C. McMahon, "Contingent Images: Looking Obliquely at Colonial Mexican Featherwork in Early Modern Europe," The Art Bulletin 103, no. 2 (2021): 26.

11. McMahon, Contingent Images, 25.

12. McMahon, Contingent Images, 45.

13. Joseph Koerner, “Dürer in Motion,” in Dürer’s Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist, eds. Susan Foister and Peter Brink (London: National Gallery, 2021), 44.

14. Albrecht Dürer qtd. in Koerner, “Dürer in Motion,” 44.

15. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has demonstrated that objects collect value and social meaning through human transactions. See Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–63. Alessandra Russo has argued that Dürer, who was intensely interested in nature studies as a way of obtaining knowledge, possibly created this watercolor in dialogue with the objects of Aztec art he saw in Brussels. See Alessandra Russo, “A Contemporary Art from New Spain,” 50.

16. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “Remarks on the Collections of Rudolf II: The Kunstkammer as a Form of Representatio.” Art Journal 38, no. 1 (1978): 22–28; Alessandra Russo, “A Contemporary Art from New Spain,” 50.

17. McMahon, Contingent Images, 26.

18. DaCosta Kaufmann, “Remarks on the Collections of Rudolf II,” 24.

19. Isabel Yaya, “Wonders of America: The Curiosity Cabinet as a Site of Representation and Knowledge.” Journal of the History of Collections 20, no. 2 (November 1, 2008): 176.

20. Daniela Bleichmar, "Seeing the World in a Room: Looking at Exotica in Early Modern Collections," in Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, eds. Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C. Mancall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 15–30.

21. Between 1545 and 1563, the Council of Trent reevaluated the role of images in the Catholic Church in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, which had led to an outbreak of iconoclasm in Northern Europe. The Council of Trent resulted in the recognition by the Catholic Church that Protestants had renounced emotion and the senses in their practice of worship and so the Church could therefore use images that elicited an emotional response to appeal to followers lost to the Protestant movement. See Marcia B. Hall and Tracy Elizabeth Cooper, “Introduction,” in The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church, eds. Marcia B. Hall and Tracy Elizabeth Cooper (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 2.

22. Hall and Cooper, “Introduction,” 2.

23. Farago, “Introduction,” 11.

Curses as Crowd Control: Tourist Folklore at Pompeii

by Rowan Murry

In 1922, news of Howard Carter’s rediscovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb took the world by storm. In February 1923, excavators reburied and secured the tomb while archaeologists catalogued their findings and made plans for the next excavation season. It was around this time that the excavation’s financier, who had been present at the opening of the tomb, died mysteriously.¹ In actuality, Lord George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon (1866–1923), had contracted blood poisoning from an open wound caused by a mosquito bite.² The press, seizing on the story of the Earl’s “mysterious” death, developed a sensationalized narrative of the so-called “mummy curse,” a legend that has pervaded the field of Egyptology ever since.³

The Egyptian mummy curse is an example of what I will refer to as “tourist folklore.” The term describes the perceived phenomenon of misfortune brought upon tourists who steal from or vandalize cultural heritage sites and the perpetuation of these myths by local inhabitants or stewards of these sites.⁴ Often, tourist folklore myths are bolstered, or sometimes even invented, by heritage site stewards to discourage theft or vandalism.⁵ This essay examines one example of how custodians of heritage sites manipulate public superstition to protect their sites from thievery and vandalism associated with tourism, especially in cases where funding and implementing physical security measures is impossible.

A valuable example of contemporary tourist folklore operates at the ruined city of Pompeii, an archaeological park near Naples, Italy (fig. 1). Pompeii is an important example not only because of its notoriety as a "dark tourist site"—a site associated with death and trauma—but also because it is one of the most visited UNESCO sites in the world, with approximately three million visitors per year.⁶ Using frameworks offered by Marcel Mauss and Michel Foucault, this essay utilizes the cultural heritage site of Pompeii as a means to explore the tourist folklore phenomenon. While the example of tourist folklore at Pompeii is not representative of all types of heritage sites and folklore, it provides an example through which to discuss themes of magic, dark tourism, and spectacle.

A discussion of the origins and function of tourist folklore requires an introduction to “contagion magic,” a dominant force fueling superstition and mysticism at Pompeii. The concept of magical contagion is best summarized by French sociologist Marcel Mauss in his book A General Theory of Magic:

The idea of magical continuity, realized through the relationship between parts and the whole or through accidental contact, involves the idea of contagion. Personal characteristics, illness, life, luck, every type of magical influx are all conceived as being transmitted along a sympathetic chain….However, magical contagion is not only an ideal which is limited to the invisible world. It may be concrete, material and in every way similar to physical contagion.⁷

In other words, once a person comes into physical or spiritual contact with an object, person, or entity, its essence, properties, or spiritual links are transmitted to the person. Contagion curses imply that the physical act of touching and subsequently removing an object from its home initiates spiritual contagion. The physical act of theft provokes bad luck caused by the object, the land, or a deity, which afflicts the offender and sometimes even their family and friends.

Pompeii shares similarities with the tourist folklore and mummy curses associated with the excavations of ancient Egyptian tombs. Anthropologist Anna Wieczorkiewicz dissects this societal fascination with ancient bodies and death, and concludes that “mummies, skulls, and skeletons become our fetishes in seeking meaning” about our own mortality.⁸ At Pompeii, visitors are immersed in a past world of paganism, debauchery, and destruction, where they play the roles of archaeologist, discoverer, adventurer, ancient Roman, and tourist.⁹ As a result, Pompeii becomes a dark tourist site where death and destruction are commodified and fetishized. This “quasi-religious mystique” of Pompeii is a crucial factor in a tourist’s decision to steal from the site.¹⁰ Visitors to dark tourist sites “seek tangible symbols of the place, the memory, meanings and experiences,” where material objects offer a medium through which they can reflect and channel complicated feelings or difficult memories.¹¹ In addition to these motivations, I propose that the act of stealing artifacts from dark tourist sites like Pompeii is an act of defiance against mortality. It is a direct challenge to the destruction and death one must face at Pompeii—it gives the thief an illusion of control, both literal and metaphorical, over natural forces.

In October 2020, the media amplified the sensationalized story of a “cursed” Canadian woman who had visited Pompeii in 2005.¹² She stole “two white mosaic tiles, two pieces of [amphorae], and a piece of ceramic wall” as souvenirs from her visit.¹³ In 2020, the woman returned the artifacts along with a letter, which stated that she “wanted to have a piece of history that couldn’t be bought,” and which she claims plagued her with bad luck and “negative energy” for 15 years.¹⁴ In the letter, she cites examples of her misfortune, including a breast cancer diagnosis and financial loss.¹⁵ She implies that the bad luck associated with the artifacts was the direct result of desecrating such a powerful site of trauma, loss, and destruction; it was a disrespectful act which activated Pompeii's magical contagion.

Luana Toniolo, Archaeological Officer of Pompeii, has estimated about 200 returns of stolen material to Pompeii over the past ten years, both resulting from and in anticipation of the potential curse.¹⁶ Toniolo suggested that artifacts which have been removed from their findspot lose their “strength as historical objects,” a quality which is crucial for the park’s mission of preservation and education.¹⁷ The park’s desire to deter tourists stealing and displacing artifacts led to a fascinating exhibition on the site’s tourist folklore. In response to the 2020 letter regarding the curse, curators at the Antiquarium of Pompeii compiled a temporary exhibition of letters and returned “cursed” objects. According to CNN, the purpose of the exhibition was anthropological, as a documentation of tourist interactions at Pompeii, but the underlying message is clear: do not steal from the site or else.¹⁸ News and media coverage of the alleged curses and subsequent exhibition further sensationalized the tourist folklore narrative maintained by the park’s staff.

The curse of Pompeii further perpetuates this air of mystique offered by dark tourism, and the stewards of Pompeii are using it to their advantage. By displaying returned cursed objects in the Antiquarium and in the media, the custodians of Pompeii are simultaneously creating further interest in the site while protecting it from future damage. The curse brings more visitors to the park, but the threat of magical contagion keeps them in line. At a place like Pompeii, which spans 170 acres, it is impossible to always surveil guests. This is where the curse plays a crucial role. In Foucault’s panopticon, a prisoner surveillance system which functions as a metaphor for modern society’s structure, the threat of constant visibility provokes self-regulation.¹⁹ At Pompeii, the threat of the curse plays the singular authoritative role which influences the behavior and social norms of the masses. Fear of this authority creates a system of self-discipline and social control—it is a means of surveillance without a physical entity.

At Pompeii, tourists’ desires to steal from the site stem from uncomfortable encounters with death, destruction, and dark tourism. The curse relies on its mystical associations with paganism and death at the site to both enrapture visitors and the media and ensure the site’s future protection from vandalism and theft. The media spectacle created by the curse serves Pompeii in various ways by preventing destruction and theft, serving as cost-effective security measures, and bringing more attention, visitors, and money to the site. In the face of mass tourism, curses can help communities and custodians regain some semblance of authority over their own heritage and history. However, in some cases, tourist folklore further perpetuates stereotypes and misrepresentations of ancient culture and beliefs. This is true for Pompeii, which is often portrayed in the media as debaucherous and esoteric. It is vital to consider the ways tourist folklore operates in different contexts and how this can positively or negatively impact our collective understanding of history and cultures.

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Rowan Murry received her BA in Art History from the University of Mississippi and is currently pursuing an MA in Museum Studies at New York University. She is particularly interested in Ancient Roman art and archaeology, ethical collecting, and interactive technologies for physical and virtual exhibitions.

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Footnotes

1. Mark R. Nelson, “The Mummy’s Curse: Historical Cohort Study,” British Medical Journal 325, no. 7378 (December 21–28, 2002): 1482.

2. Roger Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of Dark Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 8.

3. Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse, 9; “George Herbert, 5^th Earl of Carnarvon,” The British Museum, accessed December 12, 2022, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG53843.

4. Joyce D. Hammond, “The Tourist Folklore of Pele: Encounters with the Other” in Out of the Ordinary: Folklore and the Supernatural (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1995), 159.

5. Other examples of sites that have a history of tourist folklore in order to discourage theft and vandalism include The Petrified Forest in Arizona and Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park.

6. The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2018); “Visitor Data,” Pompeii Archaeological Park. This number does not account for any COVID-19 pandemic closures during 2020–2022. The most recent data comes from 2018.

7. Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic (London: Routledge, 2001), 81–82.

8. Anna Wieczorkiewicz, “Unwrapping Mummies and Telling Their Stories” in Science, Magic, and Religion: The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 68.

9. Wieczorkiewicz, “Unwrapping Mummies and Telling Their Stories,” 66.

10. Dorina Buda and Jenny Cave, “Souvenirs in Dark Tourism: Emotions and Symbols,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 719.

11. Buda and Cave, “Souvenirs in Dark Tourism: Emotions and Symbols,” 719–720.

12. Jack Guy and Nicola Ruotolo, “Tourist returns stolen artifacts to Pompeii after suffering ‘curse’ for 15 years,” CNN, October 13, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/pompeii-artifacts-returned-scli-intl/index.html.

13. Guy and Ruotolo, “Tourist returns stolen artifacts.”

14. Guy and Ruotolo, “Tourist returns stolen artifacts.”

15. Guy and Ruotolo, “Tourist returns stolen artifacts.”

16. James Gabriel Martin, “Curious tales of why tourists have been returning ‘cursed’ items to Pompeii,” Lonely Planet, October 26, 2020, https://www.lonelyplanet.com/news/pompeii-cursed-objects-tourists.

17. “About Us,” Archeological Park of Pompeii, accessed December 12, 2022, http://pompeiisites.org/en/archaeological-park-of-pompeii/about-us/.

18. Guy and Ruotolo, “Tourist returns stolen artifacts.”

19. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

Paved Paradise: The Concrete and the Stuplime at Parc des Butte-Chaumont

by Madeline Porsella

“The modernization process is complete, and nature is gone for good.”

– Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)

When the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont (Buttes-Chaumont Park) opened in conjunction with the Exposition Universelle on April 1, 1867, the city of Paris was in the midst of a legendary makeover undertaken in 1853 by Napoleon III, leader of the French Second Empire (1851–1870), and headed by Georges-Eugene Haussmann (1809–1891), prefect of the Seine. Medieval Paris’s narrow, winding streets, deemed unhealthy and unhygienic by nineteenth-century standards, were razed and replaced by wide boulevards, green spaces, and fountains. These changes, known as Haussmannization, created a new culture of display in Parisian public life, a “spectacularization” that reconfigured the relationship between citizens and the urban landscape. A rapidly developing technology, concrete, helped remake the city at every level beginning with the sewers that allowed wastewater to flow unseen under city streets. Haussmann and Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand (1817–1891), who designed the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, used the site to experiment with concrete’s aesthetic possibilities. Decimating the existing landscape, they transformed an old refuse dump into a green space punctuated with picturesque vignettes (fig.1). Concrete allowed them to simultaneously subordinate and reproduce the environment, creating an artificial landscape that Ulf Strohmayer has called a “second nature.”¹ The park’s overall effect was a simulacrum of nature “made naturally wild,” a controlled experience of pristine nature achieved via a total artificiality.²

Today, we live with the legacy of the resulting shift in our relationship to the landscape: romantic awe at nature’s unfathomable scale, the Kantian sublime, gave way to the fantasy of human domination, remaking the natural world as a containable and reproducible cultural product. ​​Updating the sublime for the twenty-first century, Sianne Ngai coined the term stuplimity: the sublime meets tedium and repetition to the point of boredom and stupefaction.³ Nature writer Robert Macfarlane uses the term to describe the daily barrage of information regarding climate change, “the aesthetic experience in which astonishment is united with boredom, such that we overload on anxiety to the point of outrage-outage.”⁴ Due in large part to concrete fantasy-scapes in the legacy of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, we are confronted daily with statistics on humanity’s detrimental impact on the environment.⁵ Calamitous destruction is reduced to a data set.

The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont was a new kind of spectacularized public works project. Breaking from the conventions of previous world’s fairs and exhibitions, installations at the 1867 Exposition Universelle were not limited to the Palais de l’Exposition; they bled out into the streets, putting renovated Paris on display.⁶ The concurrent debut of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont demonstrates how sprawling the exhibition truly was. Named for the bleak topography that had previously occupied the site, Chauve-mont or bald hill, the park had an equally bleak history: for nearly 600 years it had housed the gallows where the French king not only hung criminals, but left them on display as a warning to any would-be delinquents. After the 1789 Revolution, it was used as a quarry and refuse dump (fig. 2). The seedy location was likely chosen for the contrast it provided with Alphand’s romantic vision, demonstrating the state’s modernity and power by paving over the site’s undesirable past.⁷ To any of the fair’s eleven million visitors, the awe-inspiring views and romantic features were only enhanced by knowledge of the gory wasteland that had preceded them.⁸

Ironically, the romantic natural feeling of the park was created with innovative artifice. Alphand envisioned a wild landscape punctuated with moments of the “engineered picturesque.”⁹ In order to evoke untouched nature, engineers employed technologies that eradicated the existing environment: concrete, landscaping, and water pumps. While Alphand’s functional concrete constructions, such as an artificial lake bed, were invisible to visitors, he also deployed the material as a surface treatment for innovative decorative features—cast faux bois (imitation wood) fences, rock faces, and stalactites were all made using concrete.¹⁰ Carefully designed vistas were visible from the elliptical paved paths snaking through the park (figs. 3 and 4).

In one striking example, Alphand transformed a pre-existing lacuna in the granite, a result of quarrying, into a grotto complete with faux stalagmites and stalactites and a cascading waterfall (fig. 5). A space that had previously been nothing but cut stone now presented itself as a natural marvel. Ulf Strohmayer argues that this reconciliation of technology and landscape is “not so much an act of concealment but of acceleration….”¹¹ In the period eye, the park’s design, a “landscape full of simulacra…modeled on repetitions,” was a triumph of humankind’s capabilities.¹² To be able to reproduce the grandeur of the natural world was to play god. This power was put on full display in the park, creating a spectacle of technology and labor, the twin engines of modernization, masquerading as untouched nature. Concrete is not disguised; “it is resolved… into its products—which can thus celebrate both nature and human ingenuity.”¹³ A new landscape was formed, one that recast nature and culture as oppositional forces while demonstrating that, in truth, they produce one another.

The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont anticipates the end-product of this accelerating cycle of growth and modernization—modern, and even postmodern, Paris. Peter Collins, author of Concrete (1959), locates a shift from aristocratic favor for carving and masonry to a taste for democratic modes of building—casting and molding—in the late eighteenth century.¹⁴ Broadly, this reflects the changing values of the time, an acceleration towards a mass-consumer society. The widespread adoption and use of concrete aligned with a shifting social structure fomented by urban environments; cities industrialized, grew, and modernized to meet demand as people flooded in to provide labor. These new denizens became consumers of the goods produced under industrial conditions. By the mid-nineteenth century, concrete technology was ready to rise to society’s needs, supporting the new infrastructure of both mass production and mass consumption.

In the intervening century and a half, we have poured concrete at a monstrous pace. Concrete continues to lay the foundations for high-rises, highways, suburbs, subways, and urban sprawl, the infrastructure of modern life. It is second only to water in rankings of the world’s most used building materials.¹⁵ Due to a carbon-intensive production process, concrete is responsible for about eight percent of global carbon emissions.¹⁶ China is by far its largest consumer on earth, releasing 858.23 million tons of CO² in 2020.¹⁷ This is largely the result of amped-up development projects designed to demonstrate state authority by dominating nature. In this way, China builds upon the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont’s legacy.

The Three Gorges Dam, one such infrastructure project, exemplifies how concrete use has developed globally from the nineteenth century to the present day (fig. 6). The concrete hydroelectric gravity dam in Hubei Province was ironically conceived in an effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions from coal. It has had an immeasurable impact on the surrounding environment—increasing risk of landslides, accelerating extinction of indigenous wildlife, displacing over a million Chinese residents, and flooding archaeological sites that once sat on the river’s banks. It is so massive that its weight is estimated to have increased the length of earth’s day by .06 seconds.¹⁸

Archeologist Christopher Witmore uses the Three Gorges Dam, as imaged in Edward Burtynsky’s photographs, to describe the “Hypanthropos,” his neologism for our current epoch, defined by calamity and the often monstrous and unanticipated consequences of human projects.¹⁹ Witmore’s term is offered to replace the more commonly used “Anthropocene,” our current geological period defined by human impact on the stratigraphic record. In a 2018 paper on concrete and ice, anthropologists Tim Ingold and Cristián Simonetti identify concrete as “the most obvious candidate for marking the origin of the Anthropocene.”²⁰ In their argument, concrete is the material that afforded humans enough power over the landscape to impact the geological record.

The term Hypanthropos is playfully constructed to remind us that, though the Anthropocene is marked by human activity, we are not in control. It is a double-entendre: the prefix hyp- recalls both the Greek prefix hyper-, meaning “excess, overwhelming being,” and hypo-, meaning “a sense of being under, beneath, [or] below something.” Humans, Witmore explains, are “suspended above and below”; they both overwhelm their environments and are contained within or overwhelmed by them.²¹ Hypanthropos’s multiple meanings displace the anthropos, the human, in their larger ecological context. The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont and the Three Gorges Dam are unique to the Anthropocene, human-made objects with massive environmental impacts. They reinvent nature “as contrast—with culture, with symmetry,” when, in reality, no such opposition exists.²² Nature is paradoxically both produced by and a container of culture, both hypo and hyper, above and below.

Witmore uses Burtynsky’s images of the colossal concrete dam as a medium for illustrating our suspension. If the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont modeled concrete’s usefulness in creating controlled landscapes, then contemporary concrete infrastructure projects, which have caused immeasurable and unpredictable ecological destruction, show the fallacy in that promise. Witmore reminds us that though the scale and impact of the Three Gorges Dam are astonishing, "Over the last two decades more than half of the concrete ever produced was mixed, poured, and set—4.3 billion tons were produced in 2014 alone. As for ‘water control and utilization’ projects, more than one large dam has been built every year for at least the last 60.”²³ This is the legacy of Alphand’s experiments in concrete.

When the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont opened, it solidified the illusion that culture could dominate and tame nature, turning it into a reproducible commodity. Concrete was the critical technology in establishing the park’s “second nature,” an environment of artificiality.²⁴ However, our current state of climate catastrophe has proved that illusion, or rather delusion, to be dangerously false. No matter how convincingly we cast imitation stalactites, they will never be more than cheap reproductions. Projects like the Three Gorges Dam remind us that our technological know-how does not elevate us above the natural world. No amount of concrete will remove us from the planet’s delicate ecosystem.

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Madeline Porsella is an interdisciplinary historian and artist based in New York, NY. She studied studio art at Bard College and is currently pursuing her MA in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture at the Bard Graduate Center. Her research is focused on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where her areas of interest include the incorporation of new technologies into art and design, new media, the relationship between science and the occult, and cultural constructions ranging from memory to the gendered body.

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Footnotes

1. Ulf Strohmayer, “Urban Design and Civic Spaces: Nature at the Parc Des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris,” Cultural Geographies 13, no. 4 (October 2006): 570.

2. Strohmayer, “Urban Design and Civic Spaces,” 565.

3. Sianne Ngai, "Stuplimity: Shock and Boredom in Twentieth-Century Aesthetics," Postmodern Culture 10, no. 2 (2000). doi:10.1353/pmc.2000.0013.

4. Robert Macfarlane, “Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet forever,” The Guardian, April 1, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/01/generation-anthropocene-altered-planet-for-ever.

5. Christopher Witmore, “Hypanthropos: On Apprehending and Approaching That Which Is in Excess of Monstrosity, With Special Consideration Given to the Photography of Edward Burtynsky,” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 6, no. 1 (2019): 144.

6. Anne O’Neil-Henry, “Introduction,” Dix-Neuf 24, no. 2–3 (2020): 115–122.

7. Abigail Susik, “Aragon’s ‘Le Paysan de Paris’ and the Buried History of Buttes-Chaumont Park,” Thresholds, no. 36 (2009): 68.

8. Ann E. Komara, “Measure and Map: Alphand’s Contours of Construction at the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, Paris 1867,” Landscape Journal 28, no. 1 (2009): 35–36.

9. Ann E. Komara, “Concrete and the Engineered Picturesque the Parc des Buttes Chaumont (Paris, 1867),” Journal of Architectural Education 58, no. 1 (2004): 5.

10. Komara, “Concrete and the Engineered Picturesque,” 6–9.

11. Strohmayer, “Urban Design and Civic Spaces,” 565.

12. Strohmayer, “Urban Design and Civic Spaces,” 569.

13. Strohmeyer, “Urban Design and Civic Spaces,” 566.

14. Peter Collins, Concrete: The Vision of a New Architecture: A Study of Auguste Perret and His Precursors (New York: Horizon Press, 1959), 19.

15. Man-Shi Low, “Material Flow Analysis of Concrete in the United States,” (MS thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2005), 11.

16. Justin Davidson, “Concrete Doesn’t Have to Be an Ecological Nightmare,” New York Magazine, December 3, 2021.

17. Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, "CO₂ and Greenhouse Gas Emissions," OurWorldInData.org, accessed December 17, 2021.

18. Witmore, “Hypanthropos,” 139.

19. Witmore, “Hypanthropos,” 143.

20. Simonetti Cristián and Tim Ingold, "Ice and concrete: solid fluids of environmental change," Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5, no. 1 (2018): 27.

21. Witmore, “Hypanthropos,” 143.

22. Strohmeyer, “Urban Design and Civic Spaces,” 565.

23. Witmore, “Hypanthropos,” 139.

24. Strohmeyer, “Urban Design and Civic Spaces,” 570.