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The section called “Un art de Cour”
(“A Court Art”), a reference to the Kingdom
of Benin, highlights the most important and
elaborate artistic productions of historical Nigeria.
In his Description of Africa, published in
1668, Olfert Dapper first provided a glimpse of
the city, its king (the oba), and the inhabitants
of the kingdom. The oba was the absolute ruler
of the kingdom, though he was assisted by officers
and notables, and he managed an almost
perfectly organized state. He employed an army
of efficient craftsmen who worked mainly in
copper alloy and ivory to create objects intended
for the cult and commemoration of the
sovereign. Dapper’s text includes a description
of the palace, described as an enormous and superb
quadrangular chateau made up of many
rooms and a roof that “rests on wooden
columns covered from top to bottom with
plaques that depict their acts of war and their
battles.”1 Plaques of this kind, along with a selection
of sculptures, are displayed in the fourth
section of the show in a presentation produced under
the supervision of Armand Duchateau. These
exceptional artifacts, not only of bronze but of terracotta
and ivory as well, came to light after the
bloody British punitive expedition in 1897, when
the capital was looted and thousands of works
were sent to Europe and subsequently sold.
The fifth part of the exhibition combines art
and history that are once again different from the
others. It addresses Afro-Portuguese ivories, true
“hybrid” works created between the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries by talented artists of the Sapi
in Sierra Leone, the Bini in ancient Benin, and the
Kongo of what is now the Democratic Republic
of the Congo. These objects attest to how African
and Western elements fused in the realm of art to
create an extraordinary cultural syncretism born
of an interaction of iconographic and stylistic elements
drawn from both cultures. In his Description
of the West Coast of Africa, Moravian humanist
Valentim Fernandes states that “in Sierra
Leone, men are very refined and ingenious, which
is to say that they can manufacture beautiful ivory
works based on any model one gives them, and
they make spoons, all manner of saltcellars, dagger
handles, and many other refined works.”2 Bassani,
who curated this section, explains in the catalog
that “we were able to obtain some sixty saltcellars,
EX AFRICA
three pyxides, two dagger handles,
a dozen spoons, three two-tined
forks, and forty oliphants made between 1490 and
1530.”3 What is noteworthy here is the immediate
admiration that Europeans expressed for the artistic
talents of African sculptors who, accustomed
as they were to working with ivory, were able
to create extremely sophisticated objects that
were ultimately preserved as treasures in private
collections and in the wunderkammern
(curiosity cabinets) of the families of royals,
nobles, and scholars of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries.
The sixth section of the show, conceived of
by Pezzoli, focuses on a crucial historical and
artistic event that will be the subject of a future
article in this journal—the inauguration,
on May 4, 1922, of the XIIIth Venice International
Art Exposition, which would
later become the Biénnale d’Art, beginning
with its second iteration that was held after the
war. Within the framework of the grandiose retrospective
dedicated to Antonio Canova on the occasion
of the centenary of his death, a small exhibition
hall dedicated to “sculpture nègre” was set up
by two exceptional curators: Carlo Anti, a young
archaeologist at the time, and Aldobrandino Mo-
FIG. 6 (below): Kneeling
figure. Inland Niger River
Delta, Mali. AD 1050–1350.
Terracotta. H: 22.5 cm.
Private collection.
Photo © Frédéric Dehaen, Brussels.