Feather tights is the name usually given by art historians to a form of costume seen on Late Medieval depictions of angels, which shows them as if wearing a body suit with large scale-like overlapping downward-pointing elements representing feathers, as well as having large wings. Other sources use feathered angels to describe the style. The style is assumed to derive from actual costumes worn by those playing angels in medieval religious drama, with the "feathered" elements presumably flaps or lappets of cloth or leather sewn onto a body suit.[1] The feathers on angels in art can often to be seen to stop abruptly at the neck, wrists and ankles, sometimes with a visible hemline, reflecting these originals.[2]
Mary Magdalene's hair suit is another iconographic feature, with a background in hagiographic legend, whose depiction apparently borrows from religious drama.
Historians of English churches tend to refer to the feather tights style as 15th century, and by implication essentially English,[3][4] but it can be seen in several major late medieval European works from the late 14th to early 16th centuries. These include the Holy Thorn Reliquary in the British Museum, made by a court goldsmith in Paris in the 1390s,[5] and on two wooden angels from South Germany around 1530 (Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, right), as well as two stone ones hovering over the Lamentation of Christ by Tilman Riemenschneider at Maidbronn (1526), and others on Veit Stoss's wooden altarpiece at Bamberg Cathedral (1520–1523).[6] There is also a figure with greenish-black feathers, in Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece of 1515.[7]
The "devil in his feathers" featured in the Chester Midsummer Watch Parade as late as the 1590s, provided by the butcher's guild; these parades had originally used the costumes from the Chester Plays,[8] where "the devil in his feathers, all ragger [ragged] and rent" also appeared.[9] An early English version of the style is found in the Egerton Genesis Picture Book, an unusual and much discussed illuminated manuscript attributed by the British Library (who own it) to "England, S.E. or N. (Norwich or Durham?)" in the "3rd quarter of the 14th century".[10]
- ^ Anderson (1964), 168; Plate 10.1 shows a modern production at York attempting to recreate the effect, sadly with very baggy suits.
- ^ As for example on the Holy Thorn Reliquary; Tait 43
- ^ Anderson (1964), 167–168
- ^ Fowler, Harold North (2005). A History of Sculpture. Kessinger. p. 237. ISBN 978-1-4179-6041-5.
- ^ Tait, 43
- ^ Mellinkoff, 22; Kahrsniz and Bunz, 405
- ^ Russell; until Mellinkoff's book largely on this figure, he was often taken to be the Archangel Michael, as in Bruhn, Siglind (1998). The Temptation of Paul Hindemith: Mathis Der Maler as a Spiritual Testimony. Musicological series (illustrated ed.). Pendragon Press. p. 167. ISBN 9781576470138.
- ^ F. W. Fairholt, Gog and Magog: The Giants in Guildhall; Their Real and Legendary History With an Account of Other Civic Giants, at Home and Abroad, p. 53, reprint, Book Tree, 2000 ISBN 1-58509-084-0, 978-1-58509-084-6.
- ^ Kelly, A. K., "Metamorphoses in the Serpent in Eden", p. 316, Viator, Volume 2, University of California Press, 1972, ISBN 0-520-01830-3, 978-0-520-01830-3
- ^ Egerton Genesis Picture Book or Egerton MS 1894, British Library; see Joslin, Mary Coker and Carolyn Coker Joslin Watson. The Egerton Genesis, The British Library Studies in Medieval Culture. 2001, the section beginning on p. 142