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In and Out of Africa: Iberian Courts and the Afro-Portuguese Olifant of the Late 1400s
Abstract
Among the masterpieces on display at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, is a majestic elephant tusk dating from the late fifteenth century. Standing just over twenty-five inches high, the tusk is elaborately decorated and opened at its narrow end to make it into an ‘olifant’, a medieval name for ivory horns used for hunting calls or as an emblem of office. The complex and masterfully executed reliefs that run the olifant's entire length depict scenes of stag hunting. Heraldic emblems carved at its lower section attest to the high social rank both of the person who commissioned its manufacture and of the recipient who came to own it. In all likelihood, this extraordinary artefact served as a gift to be offered by one nobleman or prince to another. While the hand that sculpted the olifant can be identified with certainty as African, the iconography of the reliefs is unquestionably European. The combination bears witness to the crossing of both geographical and cultural borders that occurred during the fifteenth century as a consequence of Portuguese sea voyages. This hunting horn does not stand alone at the intersection of distinct cultures. Numerous other examples of African art also illustrate the cross-cultural fertility resulting from the engagement of African societies with Europe through trade and other forms of exchange in the late medieval period. As commodities of intercultural trade, these objects are interesting for what they can reveal about the African experiences of contact with Europeans in the late fifteenth century.
... 1 See among others Costa-Gomes, 2012;Petersen, 2008;Silverman, 2015;Vale, 2009;earlier, Fagg, 1959;Shahid, 1984, Walz, 1978, and work cited in detail below. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. ...
The traditional baptismal font of the kings of France for centuries, the so‐called baptistère de Saint Louis is part of 1750s–1900s French national legend. Against all evidence, the name suggests that it is the spoils of Louis IX's crusade of 1250–1254. In fact, that large, copper vessel of exceptional quality, with gold and silver figural decoration, was probably produced in Damascus or Cairo in 1320–1340, almost a century after French downfall at the hands of the Mamluks in Northern Egypt in 1250. As part of the crown treasure of France and because of its outstanding artistry, it is one of the most thoroughly researched Islamicate objects in the Louvre. The association with Louis IX is pure fiction that illustrates the nonsensical and yet persuasive economies of French national legends. Paradoxically, the ransom that the French army paid to leave Egypt in 1250 was one of the stepping stones for the rise of the Mamluk dynasty, renowned for gold and silver incrusted metalwork objects, such as the basin. In another paradoxical turn, the Mamluks who ruled the Central Islamic area from 1250 to 1517 are the military elite recruited from enslaved non‐Muslims, including Turkic and Christian populations. The basin invites us to connect the points on the archipelago that includes France, the Eastern Mediterranean (fall of Acre, 1291), Cyprus and Armenia under the Lusignans, Sicily, Naples, and the South of Italy under the Angevins. Further still, this splendid and still enigmatic work of art brings together Ming China, Mongol Persia, Mamluk Islam, and Gothic France. This paper includes the earliest French description of the basin, from 1606, published in 1642 and reproduced later, including in 1742 (Piganiol de la Force, 1742). The paper also discusses the French tradition of medievalists opposing white supremacist fantasy of white, Christian medieval origins of the French nation. Finally, the paper notes some differences between French and U.S. mentalités in relation to race, in the context of recent events (2019), based on the French ideal of republican universalism, citing such symptomatic events as the replacing of the word “race” by “sex” in the French constitution, the reluctance to base activism on collective identitaire claims, the reluctance to think in terms of race and use race‐related or communautariste terms with which to think about complex social, historical, or artistic rights and responsibilities, and the prohibition to collect race‐based statistics, but also, often in advance of similar laws enacted in other countries, such acts as the Taubira law of 2001 that recognizes France's responsibility for slavery and slave trade beginning in the fifteenth century as a crime against humanity and provides for teaching, research, and commemoration.
Ivories of different natures are one of the oldest materials of artistic expression, and they have been used widely through space and time. The purpose of this article is twofold: on the one hand, to offer a data driven analysis of Medieval and Early Modern ivories in Europe, Africa and Asia (ca. 1000 to 1600); on the other hand, to offer a critical perspective on the proposed query method itself. Nine museums with 2123 objects have been chosen for this analysis, based on the availability of a query endpoint. The proposed method has clear advantages and disadvantages. To the advantages belong the possibility of researching through several museum holdings at the same time (once the dataset is modelled), to query museum object data on view and on deposit all together, to be potentially able to provide insights into a given category from a very broad perspective, but also to search for unusual objects. To the disadvantages belong the fact that data is changeable, and that the selection of the museums is driven by the availability of a query structure. Therefore, the choice of the museums is also problematic, if one wants to address an international comparison. Furthermore, each museum offered data only in specific fields, which adds complexity to an overall query.
In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, artists in West Africa made sophisticated ivory carvings specifically for the early Portuguese navigators and their patrons. In researching the history of the ivories, the records of eighteenth-century English antiquarians are a neglected yet important source of information. Such sources help to bridge the gap between the earliest references to Afro-Portuguese ivories in Portuguese customs records (as well as the inventories of royal and princely treasuries of the late Renaissance) and their re-appearance in nineteenth-century museum registers and the collections of private individuals.
Especially valuable in this regard are the eighteenth-century minutes of the Society of Antiquaries of London, which enable us to trace the history of several African ivories associated with Fellows of the Society – in particular, Richard Rawlinson, Martin Folkes, Sir Hans Sloane, George Vertue and George Allan. In this article, the author reassesses two African ivories, an oliphant and a saltcellar, with specific reference to the Minutes of the Society of Antiquaries of London, shedding new light on the history of these beautiful objects.
In his book Afro-Portuguese Ivories (Batchworth Press, London, n.d.), William Fagg established the identity of an interesting hybrid art-form in a number of ivory objects—spoons, forks, salt-cellars and horns—carved for European use and to European design, but fashioned according to the canons of the African artist. While certain that the carvers were Africans, Fagg is unable to assign them to any particular region, or even to be certain that they were working in Africa. His tentative conclusion is that three regions have a claim to be considered as the home of these ivories: the area around what is now Freetown in Sierra Leone, the Bakongo coast, and the old Slave Coast between Whydah and Lagos. Von Luschan's theory of a Benin origin is firmly ruled out. Among his three alternatives, Fagg inclines to the Slave Coast, and in particular to its Yoruba sector, because of stylistic affinities between the ivories and Yoruba carving. Such a hypothesis runs into serious chronological difficulties, for whereas many representational features of the ivory carvings suggest that they belong to the sixteenth century, the Portuguese did not frequent the Whydah—Lagos coast until the seventeenth century, and even then the trade was with Brazil, not Portugal.