Feathered Panel (600–900): Art, History and Details

Feathered Panel (600–900) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Of all the luxury textile types made in the ancient Andes, feathered cloth was one of the most esteemed. This panel may come from a buried offering that contained more than a half-dozen large human-effigy vessels made of ceramic; inside the vessels were 96 rolled panels, all covered with the feathers of the tropical blue-and-yellow macaw. The ties that survive on the upper corners of some panels suggest they served as hangings that transformed a space from mundane to radiant and ceremonial.

Object facts

• Title: Feathered Panel
• Date: 600–900
• Culture: Peru, Far South Coast, Pampa Ocoña, 7th-10th century
• Type: Textile
• Technique: Papagayo macaw feathers knotted onto strings and stitched to cotton plain-weave cloth; camelid fiber plain-weave cloth upper tape
• Dimensions: Overall: 81.3 x 223.5 cm (32 x 88 in.); Mounted: 94 x 236.2 cm (37 x 93 in.)
• Collection: T - Pre-Columbian
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 2002.93

A detail from the museum

This panel is entirely covered in the feathers of blue and yellow macaws.

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Bergh, Susan, "Brilliant Featherwork", Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland Art: The Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine. Vol. 43 no. 09, November 2003
• Bergh, Susan E., Luis Guillermo Lumbreras, and Luis Jaime Castillo. Wari: Lords of the Ancient Andes. [New York]: Thames & Hudson, 2012.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.