the arts of africa - Dallas Museum of Art

44 1 : icons and symbols of leadership and status
3
Plaque with single figure
Nigeria, Benin kingdom court style,
Benin City, Edo peoples
16th to 17th century
Copper alloy (brass or bronze)
18 × 14½ × 3 in. (45.72 × 36.83 × 7.62 cm)
The Eugene and Margaret McDermott
Art Fund, Inc., 2005.38.McD
fig 18 A bronze plaque cast in Benin depicts an entrance
to the royal palace. In this bronze repre sentation, plaques
are depicted around doorways and affixed to columns that
support the palace. State Museums, Ethnological Museum,
Berlin.
This plaque of a high-ranking warrior chief is one of three works of art
owned by the Dallas Museum of Art from the powerful Benin kingdom.
Located inland from the Niger River Delta in present-day Nigeria, the
African kingdom was founded in the tenth century and reached its height
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Benin art, made to glorify the reigning and ancestral kings (oba), served
as both a sign of status and record of court life. Many seventeenth-century
visitors described seeing plaques engraved with pictures on their travels.
One Dutch account, published in 1668 by Olfert Dapper (fig. 19), referred
to the plaques in a description of the palace complex:
The king’s court is square . . . and is certainly as large as the town
of Haarlem, and entirely surrounded by a special wall, like that
which encircles the town. It is divided into many palaces, houses,
and apartments of the courtiers, and comprises beautiful and long
square galleries, about as large as the Exchange at Amsterdam, but
one larger than another, resting on wooden pillars, from top to
bottom covered with cast copper, on which are engraved the pictures
of their war exploits and battles, and are kept very clean.5
A casting in Berlin provides further evidence of the plaques (fig. 18).
Accounts of the plaques’ existence all but disappeared in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, only to resurface in 1897 following the British
Punitive Expedition.
The warrior chief on the Dallas plaque is dressed in formal military
attire—consisting of a shirt and a layered, leopard skin wrapper or kilt—an
elaborate hat decorated with horsehair, a coral beaded choker, a leopard
tooth necklace, and a bell for signaling his position on the battlefield. He
carries a knife under his left arm and a sword in his right hand. The foliate
background is thought to represent healing river leaves, and the rosettes
cast in relief are thought to symbolize an Edo belief that the sun made a
daily voyage from the sky into the sea and back again—the source of Benin
wealth transported in the ships.
Edo metalsmiths were casting brass before the late fifteenth century
when the Portuguese, the first European visitors to the area, arrived bringing
copper, a material valued by the Bini. The Portuguese explorer Duarte
Pacheco Pereira noted in the 1490s that the Kingdom of Beny [sic] “is about
eighty leagues long and forty wide; it is usually at war with its neighbors
and takes captives, whom we buy at twelve or fifteen brass bracelets each,
or for copper bracelets, which they prize more.”6 The brasscasters’ guild
melted down the copper bracelets and over time cast plaques, equestrian
figures and other statuary, portrait heads of rulers, pitchers in the form of
leopards, boxes, and game boards.
The demise of the powerful and glorious Benin kingdom came in 1897
following the British Punitive Expedition, a war waged in retaliation for