Commemorative Head with High Beaded Collar, Benin Court Style

Crowned busts and ornamented heads celebrate the splendour of courtly regalia: netted beaded caps, towering tiered crowns, coral collars and the ritual marks of rank.

Bronze has long been the language of power in West Africa. Cast by the lost-wax method — in which a model shaped in wax is encased in clay and replaced by molten metal — these works preserve with remarkable fidelity the faces, regalia and ceremonies of the courts that commissioned them.

A towering collar of coral beads rises from the base to the lower lip, giving this royal head its majestic, columnar silhouette. The netted cap is studded with cross-shaped clusters of bead ornaments, and long beaded strands fall on either side of the face.

Raised marks of rank sit above each eye and at the centre of the brow, the ears are rendered in stylised relief, and the circular opening at the crown recalls the way such heads once supported carved tusks on royal ancestral altars.