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Ezio Bassani
British Museum Press, London, 2001. xxxix + 328 pp., 615 b/w photos, CD-ROM. L85 hardcover.
Reviewed by William Hart
The publication of this book, the culmination of decades of work by Ezio Bassani, is a major event in the art history of Africa. It answers the call made by Jan Vansina in 1984 for "a systematic reference catalogue [for Africa] listing all known objects and all iconographic representations for different periods of time"l and shows how much can be achieved for the history of African art by a thorough investigation of original archival and visual records. This is Bassani's second such endeavor: in 1986 he identified a number of African works of art and artifacts known to have been in Europe before 1700 for an exhibition at the Musee Dapper in Paris;2 but his new work, which includes a CD-ROM of the text,3 is on an altogether more ambitious scale.
In his foreword Bassani explains the organization of the catalogue and briefly sums up what a survey of the material reveals. There is an opening essay on early collections and collectors of African art, and four appendixes dealing with specific groups of early African art: oliphants from Calabar; two seventeenth-century Kongo wooden figures, attributed by Bassani to a Master of Bamba Ngo; Kongo art in general; and the Afro-Portuguese ivories. With the exception of the appendix on the wooden figures, these repeat or summarize discussions that the author has given elsewhere, but it is useful to have them brought together.
The sub-Saharan material is divided into three groups totaling 818 objects:4 first, items that can be documented as having been in European (or American) collections before 1800 and whose present location is known or unknown (nos. 1-681); second, items known from illustrations to have been in Europe or America before 1800 but are otherwise unidentifiable (nos. 682-96); and third, items whose present location is known and which we can assume, by analogy with other documented objects, to have been in Europe by 1800, although their presence cannot be documented (nos. 697-818).
The catalogue is an impressive work of scholarship. It lists, country by country, the original museums or private collections in which early sub-Saharan artifacts have been identified and gives a brief account...