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This major British Museum exhibition displayed a fascinating range of brass, copper, terracotta and stone artefacts from the West African city-state of Ife (in present-day Nigeria) deriving mainly from the eleventh-fourteenth centuries. Perhaps the most striking and well-known artefacts on display were the figures and heads cast in brass and copper. While such sculptures were known and used as part of religious shrines in Nigeria into the last century, when they first came to the attention of European observers they caused a stir. Their naturalistic aesthetic and technical complexity caused them to be attributed variously to ancient Greek, Egyptian and even Italian Renaissance artists. What so surprised Western observers in the early 1900s was the naturalism of the brass, copper and terracotta sculptures. Many of the figures and heads on display in the exhibition are thought to be portraits of rulers and ancestral figures made in the image of living models. Rather than being stylized types, they have individual traits and features.
Moreover, as brass and copper were not locally extracted but obtained through trade, it was speculated that outsiders, if not a foreign culture altogether, might have been responsible for the production of the sculptures. Subsequent archaeological finds confirmed to the West that these were indeed African masterpieces, and it is now believed...