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Feather tights


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. 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.

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, 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, 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 (1520–23). There is also a figure with greenish-black feathers, in Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece of 1515.

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, where "the devil in his feathers, all ragger [ragged] and rent" also appeared. 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".


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