Seltener Bronzeschädel, Benin, erste Hälfte 20. Jahrhundert, altes Meisterwerk!

The bronzes from Benin were made using the "lost mold" technique. From this, a positive wax model of the later bronze object - including sprues - is modeled over a clay core and also coated with clay after completion. After the clay has been fired and the wax has run out, the resulting cavity can be filled with bronze, copper or brass. After cooling, the inner and outer clay molds are smashed to reveal the cast.

The Benin Bronzes are a group of several thousand metal plaques and sculptures that have adorned the Royal Palace of the Kingdom of Benin since the 16th century. They were sold to Europe and the USA as looted art in the era of the colonization of Africa by the United Kingdom in 1897. In Germany alone there are more than 1000 objects in museums, most of them in Berlin. Demands for the return of this cultural asset of colonial origin have been made by the Nigerian government since the 1970s and have led to the first restitutions from the Museum of Modern Art and British collections since the end of 2021.

The first panels and sculptures were made around the 16th century at the court of the Oba in the city of Benin. They include elaborately decorated cast plaques, commemorative heads, animal and human figures, objects from the royal regalia and personal ornaments. Many were made using the African brass process. Objects made from iron, wood, leather or wool at the royal court are also referred to as Benin bronzes. They present the history of the Kingdom of Benin on a social, dynastic and transnational level.

They served primarily to decorate the royal palace. The relief panels were hung with nails on the pillars and walls of the palace, other objects decorated ancestral shrines. As courtly art, they served primarily to glorify Obas and to manifest his worldly and spiritual power, as well as to honor the Iyoba, the mothers of the kings. Art in the Kingdom of Benin took many forms, the best known of which are bronze and brass reliefs and the heads of kings and queen mothers. Bronze vessels, bells, ornaments, jewelry, ceremonial weapons, and ritual objects also possessed aesthetic qualities and originality, testifying to the creative and technical artistry of their makers, though often overshadowed by bronze figural work-

In tropical Africa, the lost wax technique was developed early on, as the works from Benin show. When an Oba died, his successor commissioned the making of a bronze head of his predecessor. About 170 of these sculptures have survived, the oldest dating from the 12th century. The Obas held the monopoly on the most difficult to obtain materials such as gold, elephant tusks and bronze. They enabled the production of the magnificent Benin bronzes, with which the royal courts made a significant contribution to the development of sub-Saharan art. In 1939 in Ile-Ife, the holy city of the Yoruba, bronze heads of the god-like Oònis who ruled there were also discovered, which were similar to those of the Kingdom of Benin and dated from the 14th and 15th centuries. This discovery confirmed an earlier tradition that it was artists from Ife who brought the technique of bronze working to Benin. The confirmation of these finally reinforces the definitive recognition of the age of the early Beninese bronze casting technologies.

In the 18th century, Europeans had collected few examples of African art. Only with the colonization and proselytization at the beginning of the 19th century were African works brought to Europe in larger numbers, where they were often degraded as simple curiosities of "pagan" cults. However, this attitude changed after the Benin expedition of 1897. The inclusion of the looted works of art in European and American museums led to a general recognition and an increased appreciation of these African art and cultural assets. At first it seemed incredible to the discoverers that "so primitive and savage" could supposedly be able to create such sophisticated art objects. From this, many concluded that the metallurgical knowledge must have come from Portuguese traders who were in contact with Benin in the early modern period. In fact, long before contact with Portuguese traders, the Kingdom of Benin was a center of West African culture and civilization, producing bronze sculptures centuries before contact with Europeans.