Magazines - Tribal Art Winter 2011

By Christian Feest, director of the Museum für Völkerkunde in Vienna.

Introduction
A story to be told
The unique Mexican feather headdress preserved in the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna has engaged the interest and imagination both of specialists and the wider public ever since being discovered in 1878 by Ferdinand von Hochstetter, a geologist and first director of the recently established Museum of Natural History in Vienna. The spectacular object made of quetzal and other feathers and adorned with numerous ornaments of gold had first been recorded in 1596 on an inventory of the famous Ambras collection, one of the largest Kunst- and Wunderkammern of its time, owned by Archduke Ferdinand II of Tyrol. On the basis of his limited acquaintance with the documentary sources on pre-Hispanic Mexico, Hochstetter identified the piece as a fan-like device, or “standard,” worn on the back by a highranking Aztec military officer from the court of Moctezuma, and had the badly damaged object restored according to his interpretation.