86 FIG. 12: Commemorative head of a king (oba). Edo peoples, Benin kingdom, Nigeria. Late 16th century. Copper alloy, iron. H: 24.1 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Robert Owen Lehman Collection. Photo courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. ART on view first to commission such plaques. A great warrior king, he expanded the boundaries of the kingdom with the help of Portuguese allies. Under his rule, court arts flourished and attested to the kingdom’s power and wealth. The bronze plaques memorialized Benin’s history, hierarchy, and worldview. Attached to columns in a palace courtyard and likely arranged in narrative sequences, they formed a cohesive installation. Around 800 plaques still exist, dating to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when production is believed to have ceased.28 The battle scene belongs to a corpus of six plaques attributed to the so-called “Battle Master” and his workshop and is among the most complex plaques known.29 It may depict a scene from the Idah War (about 1515–17), waged between Benin and the neighboring Igala kingdom. In the lively tableau, a Benin war chief pulls an enemy from his horse and prepares to behead him. Recognizably foreign from the scarifications on his cheek, the enemy has already been pierced by a lance. The two are depicted in profile, while other figures appear frontally: two smaller enemies (one hovers above the action, the other holds the horse) and three Benin warriors—one with a shield and spear and two junior soldiers playing a flute and a side-blown ivory trumpet. A BRONZE PECTORAL A pectoral with two officials, dated to the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, may have been worn suspended from the neck by important retainers as part of their insignia (fig. 9). Palace officials with distinct helmets and crosses on their chests, holding hammers or staffs with knobs, often appear in Benin iconography. The crosses suggest that they represent ewua, members of a palace guild who awoke the oba each morning and conducted rituals. Another interpretation identifies them as priests of the creator god Osanobua. Pitt-Rivers acquired the piece in London on August 12, 1897, from a Mrs. Cutter, a member of a family that dealt in ethnographic and natural history objects.30 AN IVORY STAFF An eighteenth-century staff of a rider is among several works in ivory and depicts the iyase, commander of Benin’s army, in ceremonial dress and wearing a high helmet (fig. 10). It served as an idiophone and was tapped during annual celebrations. The source of this work was the auction house J. C. Stevens, from which Pitt-Rivers acquired it on April 4, 1898.31 A PLAQUE OF A DRUMMER Another remarkable work is a bronze plaque showing a dignitary with a drum in high-status attire accompanied by two helmeted palace attendants striking double gongs (fig. 11). Drummers and other musicians, members of a palace guild, appeared during festivals and ritual occasions. The figures’ elongated bodies differ from the more compact renderings of the human body in other plaques. Stylistically, this piece belongs to a group of works very likely created by a distinct master caster and his workshop— though his name is unknown. It arrived at the museum through W. D. Webster, a major dealer based in Bicester, Oxfordshire, on October 15, 1898.32 A COMMEMORATIVE HEAD Thanks to Pitt-Rivers’ meticulous record keeping, we can establish the provenance of all of the works that once went through his hands, but the histories of other
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