Linden-Museum Stuttgart: 005379

Linden-Museum-Stuttgart
Linden-Museum Stuttgart: 005379
License: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

 

Object description
This information was provided by the German museum where the object is currently located or where it was located prior to restitution.

Object Name Commemorative (copper alloy) sculpture for an Oba
Description These heads served the royal ancestor cult and were placed on altars, each in a separate courtyard of the royal palace. Sacrifices were given to them, and they were covered with sacrificial blood. This is the youngest of the three memorial heads of royal ancestors in the collection. This is indicated, on the one hand, by the deteriorating quality of craftsmanship. On the other hand also the ornaments attached to the sides of the beaded hood. They can be interpreted as "wings", the projections protruding forward underneath as snakes. Birds and (rainbow) snake stand for the connection between earthly this world and heavenly otherworld. King Osemwede (ca. 1816-48) used such ornaments to emphasize the spiritual powers of the kings, whose political and military power had dwindled. Thus they stylized themselves as the personification of the medicine god Osun. Even before that, however, kings were regarded as "divine beings," and their heads in particular were cultically revered as the "concentration of spiritual power and the people" even during their lifetimes. Text: Dietmar Neitzke.
Type Plastik
Materials Copper alloy
Size, Dimensions Height: 55 cm. Diameter: 33 cm.
Dating of Object

Museum / Collection / Acquisition
This information was provided by the German museum where the object is currently located or where it was located prior to restitution.

Museum Linden-Museum Stuttgart
Museum Inv.-No 005379
Collector Felix von Luschan (Berlin) purchased a large number of royal objects produced in the Benin Kingdom and sold parts of the collection to other museums. The objects reserved for Stuttgart were paid by Karl Knorr (Heilbronn, Germany).
Acquisition date 1899
Circumstances of acquisition In October 1898, the Hamburg company "H. Bey & Co" offered the Berlin Ethnological Museum a Benin collection that came directly from Africa. However, due to a lack of funds, the entire collection could not be purchased and was therefore to be passed on to other interested parties. Felix von Luschan of the Berlin Museum therefore informed Karl Graf von Linden in November 1898, and offered him a right of first refusal. The Linden Museum then made 15,000 M available for the purchase of objects. The purchase price was paid by the Heilbronn entrepreneur Karl Knorr, which is why the collection became known as "Die Karl Knorr'sche Sammlung von Benin-Altertümern". Von Luschan published a detailed description of the collection under the same title (1901) on behalf of Count Linden and Knorr. Other buyers of the collection included the museums in Vienna and Munich, but also people such as Hans Meyer (Leipzig) and Eugen Rautenstrauch (Cologne). Text: Markus Himmelsbach.
   
Notes

Current ownership status and location

Status restituted
Date of last status change 14 December 2022
Current ownership Federal Republic of Nigeria
Holding institution National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM, Nigeria)
Current location Linden Museum Stuttgart (permanent loan)

Categorization for the search functions
This information was included by the German Contact Point for Collections from Colonial Contexts and is intended to make the object easier to find in the database.

Object Type sculpture
Materials metal; copper alloy
Tags

Dataset

ID 119
last Change 2023-01-26 12:15:00
License Linden-Museum Stuttgart