Editorial In 1820, English romantic poet John Keats anonymously published a poem that has become a classic of the English language. Coincidentally, it happened to be about classical art. Ode on a Grecian Urn concludes with the memorable phrase, “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” In fact, Keats wasn’t quite right about this, at least with regard to Grecian urns. There was a great deal more to know. The urn that is generally agreed to have been the primary inspiration for Keats’ ode is known as the Sosibios Vase, a volute krater of Pentilic marble dating from around 50 BC, which was once the property of Louis XIV and currently resides in the collection of the Louvre. It is called the Sosibios Vase because it was sculpted by a Greek artist named Sosibios, who was working at the time of the late Republic, possibly in Rome. We know it is by him because he was kind enough to inscribe “Sosibios made me” on it. Most classical artists were not so thoughtful, however, but classical sculpture and pottery had such a ubiquitous presence in the wunderkammers of the time that people wanted to know more about them. They were highly regarded both because of their artistic qualities and their tangible connection to classical thought, so it wasn’t long before gentleman scholars began striving to find out who had made these interesting things. Since they only rarely had actual names to work with, they came up with a system of attribution named after a representative example, or name vase, which has led to appellations such as the Pan Painter (named for the masterful representation of a rampantly ithyphallic Pan chasing a goatherd on a red figure krater in the collection of the MFA Boston) and the Painter of the Vatican Mourner (after a black figure mourning scene on an amphora in the Museo Gregoriano Etrusco Vaticano). Though this attribution process is quite old, it was codified and standardized under the research and documentation project known as the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, run by the Union Académique Internationale, which published its first fascicle (a catalog devoted to a single institution) in 1922. It is an ongoing project that has now documented more than 100,000 decorated terracotta vessels with the participation of twenty-four countries in nearly 400 volumes. This artistic anonymity is shared with tribal art, the overwhelming majority of examples of which remain what Keats would describe as “still unravish’d brides of quietness.” There are some exceptions to this. The Maori canoe prow on the cover of this issue, for example, is recorded as having been carved by a Maori chief named Tamati Raru, from the look of it quite a long time before it was collected in 1889. The Maori retain a remarkable cultural memory for the subjects of their artworks (which can generally be identified by accurately rendered tattoo patterns) and their carvers, who were individuals of considerable renown. The Yoruba carver Olówè of Isè was widely regarded in his time and is well remembered both in his homeland and in the West, the latter in part due to a pair of his doors and their lintel, which, though made for the royal palace at Ikere, were included in the Nigerian Pavilion of the 1924–25 British Empire Exhibition and are now in the British Museum. The name of Kwayep of Bamana, a Grasslands sculptor from Cameroon, was first recorded by Henri Labouret, who collected a remarkable maternity figure by that artist, now in the collection of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and on display in the Louvre. He was further documented by an Englishman who spent a summer in the village of Banganté and, as a result, is the subject of a feature article in this issue that reunites his name with a few more of his sculptures. Without these “chance encounters,” as the article is so aptly titled, his name would have fallen victim to the same shift of time and context that has obscured those of so many of his fellow artists from Africa. The arts of the traditional cultures of the world are so diverse that it is difficult to make generalizations about them, but it is safe to say that, in more cases than not, the ritual sculpture created in that context was considered to be important and the specialized artists who made it were remembered, at least locally, the more so since there were never very many of them. To name but one example, Louis Perrois found that the names of certain Fang sculptors were remembered in Gabon in the 1960s despite the fact that production of ritual sculpture there had waned decades before. That these names so rarely accompanied the objects to the West is a function of the often-secret nature of the objects themselves combined with the setting of colonialism and cultural change in which they were removed from their original contexts and ended up in Western hands. Names were probably lost not because they were unimportant but because of the complexities and animosities of the interactions involved in their changing ownership. Like classical ceramics, the lack of authorship for these artworks is dissatisfying to many. Over the years various scholars have identified the work of particular sculptors, especially in African art. This has resulted in a number of “masters”—the Luba Master of the Cascade Coiffure, being among the best known and most recognizable—as well as various workshops or ateliers. While these efforts are admirable, they are largely based on individual expertise rather than a more institutionalized and organized project such as the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, and efforts to create a similarly comprehensive research tool have yet to become accessible in this field. The desire to put a name with an artwork is something deep seated in Western connoisseurship. Doing so with tribal art helps reconstruct the web of context of artists, their apprentices, their histories, and regional influences that was torn apart in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But more than just history, identifying a sculpture with a name—even if it’s only a descriptive one—helps these works to be perceived as art rather than artifact, leading to a wider appreciation that in turn assures their preservation. What’s in a name? More than one might think. Jonathan Fogel Our cover shows a canoe prow, tauihu, said to have been carved in Waitara by a Maori chief named Tamati Raru in Aotearoa (New Zealand) before 1889. Wood, paua shell, red ochre. Bishop Museum, Eric Craig Collection, 1889. Photo: David Franzen.
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