All 17 lots offered in the sale of his collection at Christie’s found takers, for a hammer total of €272,800 (£188,000), led by an early Nazca Poncho tabard (2nd century AD), right, 4ft 1in x 2ft 5in (1.25m x 74cm),
woven in cotton covered in blue, yellow, orange, white and black feathers, and featuring a toothy deity and wild animals, that sold for nearly double low-estimate at €48,000 (£33,100).
A later, slightly larger Nazca Huari tunic front (c.700-1000AD), adorned with two eight-armed suns, scored €47,000 (£32,400), and a 13in (32cm) Nazca ‘mummy bundle head’ (c.700-1000AD), far right, with human
hair, feathers fixed to cotton, and metal strips down each cheek, doubled hopes on €26,000 (£17,900).
Christie’s acknowledged some apprehension about how these unfamiliar feathered textiles would fare in the saleroom, but it was an evening of pleasant surprises, and the colourful, stylised and sometimes abstract patterns of these plumes from long ago fomented considerable excitement among collectors of Modern Art.
A case in point was the banded,
geometric-patterned, late Nazca feather panel (c.800-1500AD), right, 2ft 7in x 11in (78 x 28cm), that zoomed ten times estimate to €4500 (£3100).
Prices take flight for ancient feathered art
Halphen’s array of pre-Colombian feather textiles from Peru dated back to 100AD. Such textiles continued to be made until the Spanish invasion, and were often used as currency by the Incas; the conquistadors, though, suspected them of having mystical powers, and destroyed them whenever they could.
