Page 65 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

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"given to feasts and pleasures" and extremely These centered in Ife, Benin, and Owo, three
gifted in the arts. The latter trait quickly led to great city-states surrounded by a large tributary
trade with the European visitors, as we know territory. 16
from the reports written by Duarte Pacheco Ife, situated in the southwest of the country,
Pereira and Valentim Fernandes as early as the some 90 miles from the coast, is the oldest of
first years of the sixteenth century. 11 these cities. Its first settlement appears to date
It was around the middle of that century that to the eighth century, but little is known for
the lands of the Sapi are thought to have been certain about how it developed. Although Ife
invaded by a warlike people of Mande stock, the has remained the most important religious
Mani or Manes, who came down from the center of the Yoruba people, its political power
northeast. According to a late sixteenth-century began to decline in the fifteenth century.
account, the Mani "committed so many vexa- The known corpus of Ife sculpture — some
tions on the indigenous peoples that the latter thirty works cast in metal and a large quantity
have become less and less concerned and have in terra-cotta —attests to an artistic production
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given up the exercise of their arts/' On the of extremely high quality that, as is indicated by
basis of thoroughgoing enthnolinguistic ana- the thermoluminescence analysis of some of the
lyses, P. E. H. Hair has expressed doubts that a works, lasted from the twelfth to the sixteenth
Mani invasion ever took place, at least on the century. The dates for the terra-cottas appear
scale and with the disastrous effects reported in relatively earlier than those for the works in
the Portuguese chronicles which, in any case, metal and suggest that the artists of Ife may
were written several decades after the pur- have worked in clay initially and only later,
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ported events. Whatever the truth may have when artistic production had already developed
been, there seem to be grounds for thinking and been refined, turned to metal. The metal, a
that the Sapi carvers ceased to produce ivory art copper alloy, is often generically called bronze,
objects on Portuguese commissions of the type although since the copper is alloyed with zinc
discussed later in this essay sometime before rather than tin, brass is the correct term.
the middle of the sixteenth century, an indica- Virtually the only subject of Ife art is the
fig. i. Seated figure, Sapi peoples, Sierra Leone. tion that some kind of traumatic event may human figure and, in particular, the head, which
i6th century? steatite. Carlo Monzino collection. indeed have occurred in the area. is rendered with a sublime fusion of realism and
In addition to these ivories that shall be con- idealization. It was precisely the exceptional
sidered later on, the corpus of Sapi art includes formal perfection and the aristocratic realism of
a relatively large number of sculptures in soft the facial features — unique in African art — that
stone (steatite), the first of which were dis- led the German scholar Leo Frobenius, who in
travelers to Mali make no mention of any such covered by chance in the course of farming, 1910 discovered a group of Ife heads in terra-
terra-cottas. These uncertainties notwithstand- while additional examples were unearthed cotta and bronze, to propose the notion that the
ing, the quantity and the artistic quality of the through systematic explorations. For the most culture of Ife was to be linked to a hypothetical
terra-cottas from Mali permit us to consider the part these are human figures, in a few instances Mediterranean colony that settled in ancient
region one of the great centers of early produc- associated with animals, mostly the elephant or times on the Atlantic coast of Africa. 17 The idea,
tion of African earthenware, along with Chad, crocodile. There are also heads of considerable of course, reflects the prejudices of the period
Ghana, and, above all, Nigeria. size, great expressive power, and notable sculp- and is entirely without basis in fact. More
tural quality. recently Frank Willett has discovered, through
The scholars who have researched these careful comparisons, a number of relationships
Sapi sculptures agree that they were produced at a between the art of Ife and that of the Nok cul-
The earliest Portuguese accounts of what is now time preceding and immediately following the ture which flourished between 500 B.C. and 200
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Sierra Leone suggest a social organization with- arrival of the Portuguese. The obvious formal A.D. on the upland plain of Jos in southern
out the cosmopolitan character that prevailed in analogies with the figures carved on the Sapi- Nigeria, helping to confirm that the art pro-
the large Sudanic cities. The Sapi or (Tapes — the Portuguese ivories support this hypothesis, and duced in Ife was completely African in both
inhabitants of the coastal region and the imme- there is contemporary confirmation in the chro- origin and character. 18
diate hinterland — lived in villages governed by nicle of Valentim Fernandes, written in the first South of Ife was the kingdom of Benin, which
chiefs who, more nominally than in fact, were decade of the sixteenth century, who noted that had its capital, Benin City, some fifty miles
subject to the authority of rulers of small king- the inhabitants of Sierre Leone "love to make inland. The origins of that kingdom are
doms which, in their turn, formed a kind of idols of wood and stone." 15 shrouded in myth. According to the Nigerian
confederation. historian Jacob Egharevba, the first king of the
The Sapi were the ancestors of the Bullom, Yoruba derived dynasty acceded to the throne of
Temne, and Kissi peoples now living in this Ife, Benin, Owo Benin, whose people belong to the Edo ethnic
region. According to Walter Rodney, they con- Farther south, in what is now Nigeria, an group, in the thirteenth century. R. E. Brad-
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stituted a loose community with a common extraordinary corpus of works of art, the most bury dates that event a century later. What is
culture more than a true ethnic entity or a uni- important in both quantity and quality in all of certain is that at the time of the arrival of the
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fied state. Early Portuguese accounts described Africa during this period, records the existence Portuguese in 1485 there was a highly orga-
the Sapi as a cultivated and peaceful people, of complex and highly developed civilizations. nized society in Benin, wealthy and militarily

64 CIRCA 1492