July 13, 2025

Capes without superheroes: a New World detail on a Renaissance painting

Innsbruck, Austria, 1569. Archduke Ferdinand II paced around the room while fiddling with the ornamented chain around his neck. As his patience began wearing thin, the bolt-studded door swung open and two men lumbered in carrying a large, flat, rectangular object wrapped in a blanket. A courtier followed them in.

Archduke Ferdinand clapped his hands. “At last! Put it over there.” He gestured towards an easel.

The courtier, assisted by the porters, unwrapped the package and placed a painting on the easel. They drew back. The archduke gazed at the canvas, approaching it slowly.

An elegant city square thronged with the great and the good and their retinues. There were people in turbans, perhaps from the Ottoman Empire, and finely dressed Africans (enslaved, perhaps?) one of whom held up the train of a lady weighed down by her tiara. Ferdinand’s eyes wandered towards a darker-skinned figure on the right wearing a green and crimson cape and a striped headband.¹

“That’s the one,” he pointed at the figure. He turned and looked at his courtier. “Find me one of those capes.”

I wrote this imagined scene around a real painting now at Schloss Ambras, a Renaissance palace on the edge of the city of Innsbruck in Austria. The caped figure represents an Indigenous person from central America.

There really was an Archduke Ferdinand II of Further Austria (1529-95). He probably wore a chain sometimes. In the painting below he’s wearing his Order of the Golden Fleece chain (with its dangling sheep’s fleece ornament) over a traditional Spanish costume accessorized with gloves and a matching man-bag.

In 1569 Ferdinand asked the Augsburg nobleman Karl Villinger to send him the painting of the city square (which was not, however, its subject, but more on that soon). Here’s a view of where it ended up after Ferdinand had expanded his palace and built a curiosity cabinet, still visitable today.

Curiosity cabinets enabled collecters to classify and organize the world’s wonders in a visual microcosm of their own design. This cabinet is divided in two down the centre (the multi-coloured glass cabinets on the left) to create two long aisles:

In Humans: A Monstrous History I wrote about some of the portraits of unusually embodied people in the cabinet. Here’s the other aisle:

The painting of the city square is in fact a scene from the Book of Esther in the Hebrew Bible (the story of Esther before Ahasuerus).² The story details needn’t concern us here, but suffice it to say that it makes no sense to include Indigenous Americans or Renaissance Europeans in a scene set in ancient Persia. Yet here they are, and they are a treasure for historians.

Every remnant of the past is evidence. The trick is to figure out what it’s evidence for.

It wasn’t unusual for medieval and Renaissance painters to set scenes from the ancient world in locales resembling the painters’ own place and time. The American figures in this painting (more on the left in the middle ground, one of them in a cloak) reveal that someone in the workshop saw an image or a detailed description of a feather cloak, or was instructed by someone who had. Perhaps they had even seen one in real life, and attempted to picture it here.³

Sixteenth-century German printed and manuscript costume books (books showing what people wore) sometimes included images of people in feather clothing said to be inhabitants of Mexico or Brazil. Feather headdresses, shields, and capes had made their way to princely collections in central Europe, as traded goods and as war booty.

The American figures in this painting got me thinking about how someone like Ferdinand might have learned about potential artefacts for their collection.

Collectors often had agents and librarians doing the thinking and finding for them. Some aristocrats had a few brains of their own and actually looked at books in their libraries and Learned Things. And images like this one brought the world’s peoples to Europe in miniature, in print or in paint, to fire people’s imaginations and acquisitive instincts.

Was Ferdinand’s attention really captured by the vignette of the feather-cape-wearing figure? I have (as yet) no evidence either way (there are inventories to check), but I was certainly captivated by the caped figures since they placed, in a sixteenth-century Wunderkammer, visual evidence about the sorts of artefacts that collectors assembled in Wunderkammern.

When I was a grad student peering at images of men on maps wearing skirts,⁴ I sometimes wondered to what extent elements of an illustration were fabricated. In the case of clothing and weapons, surviving artefacts can answer that question by offering evidence that something fancy-looking in a Renaissance print or a painting was, in fact, real.

There’s something about encountering feather artefacts from the Americas that makes my jaw drop more than anything else from the sixteenth century. I first thought deeply about these artefacts as they appeared in printed images and written descriptions in European travel accounts. Here’s an example of an actual feather cape from seventeenth-century Brazil, viewed from the back:

That question of “did they make this object up?” which I didn’t know had been at the back of my mind was sometimes answered with a “nope!” when I recognized something in a museum. But that’s not to say that a given detail on a painting is an accurate record of a specific “real” artefact rather than a generic, even garbled, artistic vision.

Sometimes five-hundred-year-old pictures match surviving objects wonderfully well; other times, not so much. History’s messy!

---

Book news

Back in April I spoke with historian and podcaster Kate Lister at The British Library HistFest. The event is now streamable on the library’s YouTube channel. Our conversation included pamphlets about so-called freak shows, monster-making propaganda today, my favourite fictional monster, and more.

There’s something about the cocktail of audience-energy, adrenalin, and fatigue which plays havoc with my attempts to filter truth-telling for the sake of, I don’t know, decorum? I can’t believe I called tech bros something rude but true (not monsters, and not a swear word) on camera - or maybe I can.

Last month I was interviewed by Vanity Fair reporter Erin Vanderhoof for a piece she wrote about MAHA influencers and their obsession with parasites. In one of the quotations from our interview that appears in the essay, I observed that the far-right habit of comparing immigrants to parasitic infestations is a strategy that, in their mind, “pushes [immigrants] out of the category of the human and not even simply into the category of animals, the worst of the animals.” Read Erin’s Vanity Fair essay here.

Next in-person event: Edinburgh International Book Festival, Friday August 15^th.

---

More words from me

More of my words on art and Renaissance collecting, assembled while sitting in my hotel room steps from Schloss Ambras and gazing out at snow-capped mountains, appeared in an earlier newsletter.

I wrote about the Danish collector Olaus Worm’s curiosity cabinet for SmartHistory, the open-access centre for public art history.

You can also find me on www.surekhadavies.org,

BlueSky (@drsurekhadavies.bsky.social),

Instagram/Threads (@surekhadavies),

and LinkedIn (@surekhadavies-53711753/)