A SUPERB BENIN TERRACOTTA HEAD

of large proportions and hollow core, the broad neck encircled by a beaded coral choker beneath the face with full cheeks and pursed lips, the T-shaped nose bisecting the large, staring eyes framed by delicate lids and wearing a closely cropped, multi-tiered coiffure; fine, aged orange-tan terracotta surface.

PROVENANCE

Roland de Montaigu, Paris
Maurice W. Shapiro, New York
Acquired from Christie's New York, November 11, 1993, lot 80

CATALOGUE NOTE

According to the note accompanying this head, in 1981 a sample was taken from the front inside of the neck, and subjected to thermoluminescent analysis at Daybreak Nuclear and Medical Systems Inc., in Connecticut. The median date for the firing of the terracotta was 1521 A.D.

Terracotta heads in the enormous corpus of Benin art are exceptionally rare, and heads of the quality, condition and age of the offered lot appear infrequently. The only comparable head offered for sale at auction in the past twenty five years, is a more fragmentary, but clearly old head from the Collection of Jay Leff, offered at Sotheby Parke-Bernet, October 11, 1975, lot 116.

In historic times, terracotta heads were made by the brass casters and, indeed, today in Benin, terracotta heads are placed on the ancestral altars of the members of the brass caster's guild to distinguish them from those of kings for which the cast heads are used to honor royal ancestors, and from those of chiefs, whose commemorative heads are made of wood (Ezra 1992:47).

According to oral tradition, in the past, terracotta heads were placed on the paternal ancestral altars of the first kings of Benin, the Ogiso
dynasty, who probably ruled before 1300 (Ben Amos 1980 :figure 12). In the past they were also placed on altars in the quarter of Benin known as Idunmwum Ivbioto, the sons of the soil, which was built during the Ogiso period, and in Idunmwum Ogiefo, the ward guild responsible for purifying the earth after taboos had been violated (ibid:15).

Stylistically, most terracotta heads display the low, tight fitting bead and collar coiffure of overlapping rows of ringlets that charcterize the
earliest period of Benin brass casting (14th-15th century). Compare the delicate treatment of the face and the full cheeks with a brass example, now in the National Museum of African Art, number 1982.82-5-1 (Ezra 1992: figure 17).