Page 186 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

A spoon now in Copenhagen and another piece
from Benin (Bassani and Fagg 1988, nos. 61,161)
were registered in a Danish manuscript inventory
of 1689 as "two East Indian carved spoons with
lizards and snakes on the handles" (Dam-Mikkel-
sen and Lundbaek 1980, 47, 48). It is beyond
doubt, however, that the spoons are African, as
analogies with other works from Sierra Leone and
Benin have established.
From the very valuable account book of the
Casa de Guine, we note the importation into early
sixteenth-century Europe of 114 spoons in ivory
(colhares de marfy) and 22 in wood (colhares de
pao). F. C. Ryder (1964) and Avelino Teixeira
da Mota (1975) have analyzed the merchandise
subject to tax besides spoons and saltcellars (in
particular, rice and woven straw mats) and have
concluded that the ships touched shore in Sierra
Leone, where rice was abundant, indicating that
the spoons also came from that part of Africa.
This conclusion is confirmed by the early
report of Valentim Fernandes. His contemporary,
Duarte Pacheco Pereira, is even more explicit in
Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis, written between 1505
and 1508, where he affirms that in Sierra Leone
"the finest ivory spoons are made, worked better
than anywhere else and also they make palm mats
that they call bicas, very harmonious and beauti-
ful" (Pacheco Pereira 1905,134). At the same time
he lists ivory spoons and woven mats like those
registered by the Casa de Guine.
Not all of the 114 colhares de marfy on which
a tax was levied in the year 1504-1505 correspond
with the decorated examples ordered by the Euro-
peans. If we take this number as a yearly figure,
then their total would have reached several thou-
sand. Yet only eight Sapi-Portuguese spoons
and three forks have to date been identified.
It is probable that for the most part the spoons
recorded in the account book were simple and
without decoration, valued for the material used
to make them and, like the wooden spoons, their
significance as souvenirs. Most of them have
presumably been lost or confused with other
objects imported in more recent times. E.B.

/O
mals in lively and highly refined combinations. The spoons and forks almost certainly served an
The unequivocal manner of representing the ornamental rather than practical purpose, as was OLIPHANT
crocodiles with blunt tails and transverse reliefs true also of the saltcellars. However, a practical late 15th—early i6th century
marking the juncture of the necks to the rest of use is suggested by the inclusion of what appears Sapi-Portuguese style, Sierra Leone
the bodies leads us to attribute the London fork to be a Sapi-Portuguese spoon in the painting ivory
and spoon to the very talented author of four The Death of the Virgin by the Mestre do Paraiso length 63 (2/f/s)
saltcellars (Bassani and Fagg 1988, nos. 27-30), of 1520-1530 (Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, references: Pigouchet 1497; Bonanni 1709; Fagg
which present an original solution. The container Lisbon), where it is shown immersed in a con- 1981; Bassani and Fagg 1988
proper is attached to the conical base by a series of tainer of food. It is nevertheless possible that the Armeria Reale, Turin
slender semicircular elements along which slide object is actually a Portuguese metal spoon that
serpents and crocodiles, forming a spherical open- by chance resembles a model used by an African Oliphants do not appear in the lists of objects in
work cage. carver. the account book of 1504-1505 in the Casa de

EUROPE AND THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD 185