ART on view 76 a (top): Saint Täklä Haymanot (founder of the Monastery of Däbrä Libanos in the 13th century) holding a flywhisk and hand cross, seated between his successor and an umbrella bearer. b (above left): The Archangel Raphael with Tobias. c (above): The damned in torment, represented by five naked black figures identified as “sinners” held by Telemachus, the angel of darkness, with the devil lying at the bottom. d (left): Roman soldiers arresting Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Pigments on vellum. 26 x 17 cm (each sheet). The Robert J. Ulrich Works of Art Purchase Fund, MIA 2009.39.3ii, 3a, 3ee, 3q. FIG. 3: Water pitcher, aquamanile. Edo, Benin Kingdom, Nigeria. 18th century. Bronze. H: 43 cm. The Miscellaneous Works of Art Purchase Fund, MIA 58.9. THE COLLECTION The MIA had quite a late start in collecting sub-Saharan African art. A handful of museums in the United States acquired substantial and often high-quality collections of sub-Saharan art during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. They were primarily science and university museums—the Buffalo Museum of Science, the American Museum of Natural History, the Hampton University Museum, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the National Museum of Natural History—but also included fine art museums such as the Cincinnati Art Museum and, notably, the Brooklyn Museum.1 The MIA’s collection got underway half a century later and, as such, represents a more careful and modern approach than early ethnographic departments employed. The first sub-Saharan work of art to enter the MIA collection was a magnificent nineteenth-century Congolese Luba helmet mask in 1953 (figs. 2a&b). It was acquired from the dealer-collector Richard H. Zinser of New York as a memorial gift from the Pflaum family but has a telling sticker on the inside that reads “Ratton Paris.” The elaborately carved headdress—three braids on either side of the face and a vertical, looped braid in the back—is topped by a carved diadem, a headband-like crown of beaded raffia that is characteristic of Luba chieftains. Three related masks are known. Of the two that lack the looped braid in the back, one was collected by Oscar Michaux in 1896 in north-central Katanga and is now in the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale in Tervuren, Belgium, and the other was collected in 1906 by Leo Frobenius, also among the western Luba, now in the Museum für Völkerkunde in Hamburg, Germany (see the article on these masks in the Object History section of this issue). FIGS. 4a–d: Leaves from a Christian album. Ethiopia. Late 17th century.
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