CategoriesCultural and Religious Styles
Benin Art
Royal art of the Edo kingdom of Benin, in present-day Nigeria: cast brass heads and plaques, carved ivory and coral regalia.
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No open-access works for Benin Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Benin City in southern Nigeria was the capital of an Edo kingdom ruled by the oba. It is not the art of the modern Republic of Benin to the west. A guild of brass casters, still working on Igun Street, made heads for royal ancestral altars from at least the 15th century using the lost-wax method. Earlier heads are thin-walled and naturalistic; later ones grow heavier, with tall collars of coral beads.
Around the 16th and 17th centuries, casters produced hundreds of rectangular plaques for palace pillars, showing the oba with attendants and warriors, and Portuguese traders with long hair and helmets. Ivory carvers made small pendant masks, including images associated with Queen Mother Idia, and whole elephant tusks carved in spiralling bands to stand on altars. British forces sacked the palace in 1897 and carried off thousands of objects, and several countries have since begun returning them to Nigeria.
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