German Contact Point for Collections from Colonial Contexts: Benin-Bronzes in Germany

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Linden-Museum Stuttgart: 005396




Linden-Museum Stuttgart: 005396 License: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)




Linden-Museum Stuttgart: 005396 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	Sculpted "guardian" or attendant (copper alloy)
Description	This fully sculptured figure is almost certainly from an ancestral altar, one of which was located in each courtyard of the royal palace. Depicted is a man in the typical prayer posture, the fingertips perpendicularly aligned to the otherworldly upper world. This motif is taken up in the snake-like form from the fontanel to the forehead. The strict lateral symmetry stands for order and harmony. The rigid, immobile posture as well as the wide-open eyes represent a sacred state of calm and balance, close to the ancestors. Text: Dietmar Neitzke.
Type	Figur
Materials	Copper alloy
Size, Dimensions	Width: 15 cm. Heigth: 46 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	005396
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	Temporarily at the Linden-Museum Stuttgart

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	134
last Change	2023-01-26 12:15:00
License	Linden-Museum Stuttgart

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