COLUMBIAN HISTORICAL EXPOSITION AT MADRID. 337 



Two other pictures representing a Madonna and St. Peter before 

 Christ are now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum at Vienna, and are 

 numbered 24 and 25 in the general catalogue. 



The Royal Ethnographical Museum in Berlin and Mr. Phillip 

 Bectier (?), of Darmstadt, possess some fine examples of the kind. It 

 would be difficult to determine the precise age of the majority of these 

 curiosities of technical skill, as the native art has never become extinct 

 in Mexico, and is even practiced to the present day. Unfortunately 

 whereas the best and apparently oldest specimens are painstaking 

 copies of excellent originals, the more modern productions show a steady 

 deterioration of workmanship, taste, and design. A painful contrast 

 to earlier productions is the meritorious but utterly inartistic histor 

 ical relic that occupied a conspicuous place in the National Museum of 

 the City of Mexico, and is described in the catalogue as &quot;Arms of 

 the Republic of Mexico, surrounded by trophies, composed of feathers 

 in imitation of the old native feathers-mosaic work by Seiior Jose Rod 

 riguez, who presented it to the congress in 1829.&quot; 



A brief summary of the present report establishes that there exists 

 at the present day eight fine specimens of purely native work, dating 

 from the time of the Conquest. The exhibition contained the origi 

 nals of two and copies of three of these. Of the three masterpieces of 

 Hispano-Mexican art preserved, one was exhibited in original and 

 another in copy. 



Moreover, reproductions of paintings by means of feathers were also 

 displayed, and thus the exhibition afforded unprecedented opportuni 

 ties for the study of the different branches of the peculiar art of work 

 ing in feathers, invented and practiced by the aborigines of Mexico. 

 H. Ex. 100 22 



