Content area
Full Text
The Art of Ife A Descriptive Catalogue and Database by Frank Willett with a chapter by Barbara Blackmun. Database prepared by Emma Lister. Glasgow: The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, The University of Glasgow, 2004. CD-ROM, wwo.hun terian.gla.ac.uk/artofife GBP25.00.
In 1959, British scholar C.P. Snow gave a lecture about the failure of communication between the sciences and the humanities. The dichotomy soon became an influential book titled The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. The breakdown between these two worlds presaged a larger fragmentation of knowledge, as learning became increasingly specialized.
But the two cultures are not as estranged as is often thought. Frank Willett, the undisputed world authority on classical Ife bronzes, terracotta, and sculptures, stands as one of the exceptions to Snow's assertion. Willett's lifework shows us that scientists and humanists are in many ways similar kinds of insightful people. Although they have different interests and speak different languages, there is a great deal in common between science and art, and it can be combined in the same individual.
Willett relies on knowledge gained over forty years from his and others' archaeological excavations, stylistic analyses, ethnographic reports and, more recently, laboratory analyses to compile this compendium of data and digital images. His earlier Ife in The History of West African Sculpture (1967) and Treasures of Ancient Nigeria (1980) are reference texts.
The Art of Ife CD-ROM displays Willett's rectitude in collecting data, his critical and cautious eye, and his profound respect for and superb knowledge of the objects. Willett's meticulous concern for the data he has culled demonstrates a highly disciplined concentration on Ife art. For those who warmly recall it, or for those who resist the trend in punk African art scholarship of the contemporary, Willett is associated with that...