Episode 31: The Benin Bronzes, Part I

Ahoy, there! This episode is the first in a two-part series exploring the Benin Bronzes, a body of several thousand objects in bronze and brass that were looted from the Kingdom of Benin by the British in 1897. In this episode, we explore the historical and cultural context in which these magnificent bronze works were created, used, and beloved before talking about the bronzes themselves: what do they show? For what purposes were they made? What in the heck is lost wax casting? Come for the knowledge, stay in spite of my terrible pronunciation of Edo words/names.

Transcript

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Wait, am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. All right, let's mango.

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Hello, and welcome to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Lindsay. Hi. For those of you who do know me, hello to you two. I'm very glad you're back. I am also glad to be back after about two months. Whoops. I've survived the holidays. I made it to the new year, which, you know, no small thing these days. And um, oh yeah, I did something else. I got my PhD in art history. Which, you know, pretty cool. Or maybe not cool. I don't know that you would describe someone who chose to get their art history PhD as cool, but it feels pretty good. Now I just have to find a job, but we're not gonna talk about that. What are we going to talk about? The name of the game is in the title, people. I'm here to tell you stuff about some cool things. This is going to be a two-episode series. I recorded it as one, it was almost two hours long, and I panicked. So I'm making it two. This is part one, obviously. I will have part two up, probably within the week, maybe like a week and a half, but it's already written, most of it's recorded, I just need to edit it. Could I do that right now? Yes, but I need time to sleep and do other fun stuff, like sleep and nap and sleep. In this two-episode arc, I will be covering some sensitive topics that may not be suitable for all listeners. And by sensitive topics, I am specifically referring to an event that occurred in 1897, which I primarily cover in the next episode. I don't get graphic or anything like that, but I also don't skirt around it. So just keep that in mind. This episode you are currently listening to should be fine. Uh the most offensive thing in it is definitely going to be my pronunciation of Edo and Nigerian words and names. Or should I say my attempted pronunciation of Edo and Nigerian words and names. I do my very best. Seriously, you guys have no idea how much time I have spent on Nigerian YouTube channels trying to figure out how to say some of this stuff. That is part of the reason why it took me so long to write this episode. Before jumping into the content of today's episode, I wanted to acknowledge the three most crucial sources that I used to write the episode. Those three books are Dan Hicks's The Brutish Museums, Barnaby Phillips's Loot, Britain and the Benin Bronzes, and Catherine Waisaki Gunch's The Benning Plaques. Without those three books, this episode would not have happened. So I wanted to acknowledge them right away, as they deserve. But now, on to the bronzes. So this is it. The part where I tell you stuff about several thousand things, their history, and the people who made them. The Benin Bronzes, part one. The term Benin Bronzes, spelt B-E-N-I-N, Benin Bronzes, refers to a body of several thousand objects. It's unclear how many, but estimates range from between 3,000 to upwards of 10,000 individual items. This collection of thousands of objects were looted by the British from the Kingdom of Benin in 1897, at which point they were scattered throughout Europe, the US, and beyond in both public and private collections. Despite the term being Benin bronzes, the term doesn't necessarily refer to objects exclusively in bronze. Many of them are in brass, which for our intents and purposes is basically the same thing as bronze, but there's also objects made of things like wood and ivory that tend to get grouped with these other items, given that they were all looted from Benin at the same time. If you have heard of the Benin bronzes before today, it's likely that you learned about them within the context of debates regarding the act of repatriation. Repatriation sounds real fancy, but its meaning is pretty simple. In the context of art history, repatriation describes the act of returning an object that was unethically or illegally taken from a person or a place. Now, whether you know the word or not, many of you, most of you I would even say, will be familiar with the concept with regards to artworks and treasures stolen by the Nazis during World War II. For a very long time, Nazi-looted art was front and center in conversations about repatriation and in efforts to actively repatriate things. Within the past, I don't know, 10 years or so, maybe a little bit longer, the spotlight has now shifted, with attention now being on objects acquired during colonial rule and specifically through active acts of colonial violence. Is all colonialism kind of an act of violence? Yes. But I'm talking like violence, like war, guns, death, looting, pillaging, piracy, etc. If we are continuing with the metaphor of the stage and the spotlight, which I am, the Benin Bronzes might be said to have top billing or near top billing in conversations regarding the repatriation of objects taken during colonial rule. There is not a week that goes by that I don't see some mention of the Benin Bronzes in one of the, I don't know, five art history newsletters to which I subscribe, and if we're being honest, uh very rarely actually read. I I peruse, I browse, but my intentions are a lot better than my attention span, shall we say. This is all to say that the Benin bronzes are a very, very popular topic of conversation these days, which is good. They deserve all of this attention and more. That's where I come in. Hello. I'm going to tell you all about it. Unlike Nazi warloot of World War II, the Benin Bronzes come from a time, a place, and a culture that are very likely unfamiliar, if not unknown, to the vast majority of you currently listening to this podcast. I am a classic example of that. I have known about the Benin Bronzes for years. I knew that they were taken by the British, and now they're in a bunch of collections, and that there was a country in Africa that wants them back. Could I have told you which country? Probably not. Could I have even told you what these things look like? Yes, but probably not well. Did I really know anything about anything? Hmm, not really. What I realized was this. Most discussions that people have about these bronzes begin with 1897, the year in which they were looted. There's not a lot of emphasis placed on like what these things are, how are they made, what do they show, what cultural significance do they have to their people. I think, however, that these objects and the people who made them and used them deserve to have their whole story be told, not just the traumatic parts of it. This episode, part one, of the two-part series, will explore the history of the Kingdom of Benin and the creation of the bronzes. Part two will cover the rest of it, the historical events that brought these bronzes to Europe and America, and the significance of their continued presence in those collections today. Before talking about the bronzes themselves, I wanted to provide a little history lesson that will help us situate the bronzes in their historical context. It's gonna be a little rough and tumble. I'll be skipping some centuries here and there, but I promise you that after you listen to this, you will know more about this topic than like the vast majority of people. And I personally grant you the right to feel very superior about it. The Benin Bronzes originate from an ancient empire known as the Kingdom of Benin. This kingdom flourished due to its location between the Niger River and the Atlantic coastline in what is today southwestern Nigeria. Side note: the Kingdom of Benin should not be confused with the Republic of Benin, which is an independent African nation bordering Nigeria that basically has nothing to do with what we're talking about, so we're just going to ignore it. All that remains of the kingdom today is its capital, Benin City, which is one of the largest cities in Nigeria, I think it's like number four, and even serves as the capital of the state of Edo, spelled EDO, Edo, like the city in Japan, but it's not the city in Japan, it's a state in Nigeria. While Edo and Benin sound absolutely nothing alike, historically speaking, the kingdom of Benin was also known as the Edo Kingdom, with Benin City also going by the name of Edo. The same is true of the ethnic group that has occupied this area of southwestern Nigeria for centuries, the Edo people, who were the Kingdom of Benin's primary inhabitants. So just to be clear, when I say Edo, I am referring to something or someone related to the Kingdom of Benin. Now the history of the kingdom is a bit hazy. That is because in the Kingdom of Benin there was no system of writing. History was instead kept and passed down orally. It was spoken. No one had ancient iPads that they could like beep boop beep boop pop this stuff on because writing didn't exist. In fact, the first written history of the kingdom didn't even appear until the 1930s. But we do know some stuff. The Kingdom of Benin was likely founded around the year 1000, give or take a century or two, by a dynasty with divine origins known as the Ogiso Dynasty. Other than having these kind of mythical origins, the only other thing we really know about this dynasty is that Benin City was established as the kingdom's capital sometime during the Ogiso dynastic rule, and it has served as a kind of heartbeat for the kingdom ever since. It's a very important royal, religious, and cultural center. Around the year 1200, the Ogiso dynasty phases out, which is to say that the male line of succession stopped producing heirs. And so a second dynasty then takes over. This is known as the Oba dynasty. In addition to being the name of the dynastic or familial bloodline, Oba is also the word for king, which is a position that passes down through the male line. To this day, year one, ABW, after Betty White, which is to say 2022, the Oba dynasty remains unbroken. Meaning that the current Oba of Benin, and yes, there is a current Oba of Benin, Aware II, can trace his lineage back to around the year 1200. I can barely remember the names of my great-grandparents, so props to him. The current Oba, Eware II, is named after one of the greatest Obas in the kingdom's history, Oba Aware the Great, or Ewari I, who ascended to the throne around the year 1440. It was during Ewari I's reign that a series of major events occurred. The first is that the kingdom underwent a period of expansion thanks to the military conquest of surrounding territories. In other words, it became something of an empire. The second involves a major building project underway in Benin City. The project involved the construction of a system of walls made of earth in and around the city and its surrounding area. Now you might be thinking, what is the big whoop about a wall made of mud? Oh well. This construction project was nothing less than an amazing feat of engineering. It is said that the walls required 100 times, 100 times, more building materials and labor than it took to build the greatest of the Egyptian pyramids, and and and and in their heyday, if you put them all in a line, these walls were said to have been four times the length of the Great Wall of China. So, like, pretty impressive. While the walls today exist only in fragments, their construction demonstrates that this was an organized and efficient society in which those in charge could harness an incredible amount of material and labor to achieve incredible things. It was still under the reign of Oba Awari I that one other absolutely crucial event occurred. The Kingdom of Benin had its first contact with Europeans, the White Man. I'm hearing this in Schmidt's voice from New Girl, a white man? Great show. Good for a laugh. It was around 1470-ish that navigators from Portugal, to the Portuguese, docked their boats at the Bight of Benin, which is the name given for the slice of coastline that the kingdom more or less controlled, the Bight of Benin. This marked the beginning of what would be a highly productive and lucrative relationship, both monetarily as well as culturally. This was huge. This relationship really flourished during the 1500s in the reign of two more of the kingdom's most celebrated Obas, Oba Ozola and Oba Ezigui. These relationships were so significant that there are even stories about Portuguese men who lived in Benin City at the invitation of the Oba for months, if not years. It was, for a long time, a very good relationship. Now, why were the Portuguese so invested in maintaining and building this relationship with the Edo people? One of the major reasons, probably the major reason, was trade, particularly for things like pepper and ivory. These were things that back home could fetch enormous sums of money. The Portuguese also wanted to convert the Edo people to Catholicism, or at least some of the Portuguese were trying to do that. At one point, they even promised to give the Edo people guns in exchange for, like, you know, basically their souls. And it kind of worked, like, a little bit, because there are a few instances in which Obas were baptized as Catholic and even learned how to read and write Portuguese. But, for the most part, I don't know how interested someone like Oba Ozola was in actually being a Catholic. However, he was definitely interested in those sweet, sweet guns, which was a technology that people in this part of the world had not yet developed or even seen, and could have potentially meant the complete transformation of warfare for their people. Spoiler alert, Christianity never really took with the Edo people, who instead retained a polytheistic belief system. So not only did they believe in numerous gods, so polytheistic, they also believed in the divine kingship of the Oba, who is regarded as something of a godlike or divine being as well as a king. The Portuguese, and later the Dutch and the British, were very put off by this, referring to it as, quote, fetish worship and quote, juju. It doesn't really help that some rituals in the Kingdom of Benin did involve human sacrifice. It's not totally clear how prevalent those practices were, but they definitely occurred. And in the eyes of the Europeans, this was all kind of freaky, to put it mildly. I gotta say, I find it very odd that Europeans, specifically during the kind of 1500 to 1700 year range, were so upset by human sacrifice. And I get why it's upsetting in and of itself. It's a very upsetting concept. I would hope that most people would agree with that. But like, this is the time in which something like tens of thousands of people were burnt at the stake in Europe for allegedly being witches. Talk about bad juju, am I right? Then again, maybe I'm partial, as most of those alleged witches were unmarried women over the age of 40, which, judging by how the last 30 years have gone for me, are my future people. Another not great look is the fact that in addition to trade and the conversion of souls, the Portuguese were also very, very interested in one of the kingdom's other commodities, slaves. The Kingdom of Benin was very active in supplying the transatlantic slave trade, particularly under the reigns of warrior Obas like Eware and Ozula, who in expanding the kingdom had increasing access to conquered peoples. Many of those individuals became slaves, either in the kingdom itself or destined for some other terrible situation in Europe or the so-called New World of the Americas. The slave trade in this area was so prevalent that the Atlantic shores of this area, the Bight of Benin, earned a nickname, the Slave Coast. European people also didn't tend to have a barrel of laughs when they were in these parts, to the point where, in addition to being called the Slave Coast, the Bite of Benin was also referred to as, quote, the white man's grave. This isn't necessarily because of the people who lived there and them being aggressive, no. The most aggressive things waiting for white people on the Bite of Benin were things like mosquitoes, which carry malaria, and whatever the heck causes yellow fever, which was another big disease that white people didn't do very well with. Despite these rather dark realities of this time and place, the period between about 1500 and 1700 is considered the golden age of the Kingdom of Benin. But it was in this period that another group of metals reigned supreme: copper, brass, and bronze. Did you see what I did there? Because the Kingdom of Benin and the Edo people did not have a system of writing, the accounts of European traders and navigators visiting the area in the 1500s, are the earliest that we have regarding the kingdom and its people. Several of those accounts, primarily written by the Portuguese and the Dutch, recount the prevalence of quote-unquote copper or bronze adornments in the city, which were especially prevalent at the Oba's palace and as part of ancestral shrines or altars. Now I say quote-unquote copper because the things that these people were seeing were probably brass and bronze. It's similar to seeing a white stone and being like, oh hey, there's marble, but in reality it might be something like limestone. It's clear from both European accounts and archaeological records that the Edo people, specifically in Benin City, had been involved in bronze work and bronze casting for centuries before the Europeans rowed their big old boats into town. The art form, however, really took off after the initial contact with the Portuguese. That's not surprising, given that this was a great time of expansion for the kingdom, expansion of territory, expansion of wealth, and the expanding awareness of other cultures. That is the sort of stuff that breeds innovation. This contact with the Portuguese was also critical material-wise, because the Portuguese paid the Edo for their trade goods in a form of currency known as manilas or manillas, a word that likely derives from the Spanish or the Portuguese word for bracelet. And this method of currency really does look like a bracelet. It looks like a thick metal bracelet shaped like a horseshoe that you can just push on to your wrist. And these things were coming into the kingdom by the boatload. Oftentimes, literally. There were literal boatloads of these quote unquote bracelets arriving in the kingdom of Benin. That's law bracelets. Manilas came in different weights and measures, as well as in different materials, though the most prominent of those were bronze. Bronze and copper, aka the raw materials used for bronze casting. So not only do the Edo people already have an awareness and technological practice in working with bronze, but they now have a huge amount of material to work with. And just a note on materials. You heard me say earlier that some of the Benin bronzes are actually made of brass. Bronze and brass are both copper alloys. They are a mixture of copper and another kind of metal. For bronze, that's copper and tin, and for brass, that's copper and zinc. Copper was rarely used for sculptural purposes, primarily because it's really, really difficult to melt copper. You have to be able to get it very, very, very hot, the importance of which we will talk about a little bit later. In addition to having oodles of raw material, there was also undoubtedly technical and cultural exchanges occurring between the Edo and the Portuguese. That may have included the sharing of knowledge about bronze casting, given that Europeans, uh, I'm not sure like what the Portuguese were up to at that point, but bronze casting was like something they were doing in Europe. It was something that these people had in common. One should also never underestimate the power of novelty as inspiration. The Edo had never seen people who looked like the Portuguese or dressed like the Portuguese. They had never seen guns. These aren't things that are directly related to bronze casting, but they do carry important cultural and artistic currency in and of themselves. It was all of these things, and I'm sure others, that contributed to an explosion of bronze casting in the city, metaphorically, not literally. Now, what exactly are the Edo people making? Uh, the answer is a lot. As I said earlier, the body of work that we now know as the Benin Bronzes uh includes thousands of objects produced over the course of centuries. Very broadly speaking, and I'm talking very, very, very broadly, the Benin bronzes can be separated into two categories, plaques and freestanding sculptures. Let's talk about the plaques first. The bronze plaques from Benin are generally rectangular or rectangular-ish compositions that depict figures, sometimes animals, rendered in high relief, so the figures emerge from but stay connected to a flat, flat-ish background. Most of the plaques show figures, all arranged frontally with exaggerated features and proportions. The eyes, noses, and lips tend to be very large and emphasized, heads are huge, torsos and arms are extremely long, and legs are quite short. It's a very stylized approach to the human figure. In addition to this stylized approach to the human body, the plaques and Benin art in general seem to have favored hieratic scales and compositions. Now that sounds real fancy, I know, but it's not. When related to something like scale or composition, the word hieratic, deriving from the word hierarchy, is a fancy way of saying that the artist is using both scale and the placement of figures to signal how important they are in relation to one another. So if you see a very tall man flanked by two small figures, that's not necessarily a man with children, but more likely the Ulba flanked by men of lower rank. It's also clear what figures are the most important based on their dress, which the artists rendered in incredible detail, paying particular attention to textures and patterns. To put it simply, the level of craftsmanship on display in these plaques and in the Benin bronzes generally, is extremely impressive and clearly the work of master bronze casters. Not all of the plaques depict the Oba or the Edo people or West Africans. Some depict Europeans, specifically the Portuguese, who are all identifiable based on their armor, their costume, and, of course, their guns. That's a pretty straightforward giveaway. If a figure has a gun, he's probably a white man. These figures are also very clearly coded, if you will, European in their features. They are almost like caricatures of white men, with long beards, slightly skinnier hooked noses, and smaller eyes and lips. There is one in particular that I really like. It shows a Portuguese man, but instead of a patterned background like many of these plaques have, the figure is instead surrounded by five large manillas, the horseshoe-looking currency with which the Portuguese paid the Edo. I don't think it's supposed to be funny, but I find it hilarious. To me, it's like showing someone with like big Dallas signs around them, which I find very charming. The inclusion of Portuguese figures on these plaques is also quite useful because it makes these plaques easier to date. Now, obviously, these plaques would have to date after the late 1400s, which is when the Portuguese first made contact with the Edo. But even more specific is the armor and clothing worn by the men depicted, much of which wasn't worn in Europe until the early to mid-1500s, thus correlating to the rough date given to most Benin bronzes of between 1500 and 1700-ish. In their heyday, these plaques covered the walls, columns, and other architectural surfaces in the Oba's palace. They weren't hung like pictures, but rather placed one after the other, sometimes even overlapping, kind of like scales. There are even a few plaques that show figures standing in front of architectural structures covered in these plaques. According to scholar Catherine Waisaki Gunch, who literally wrote the book called Benin Plaques, so I trust her, there are some instances in which you can actually match up the plaques adorning those background structures with plaques that actually exist, which is bananas. It's like plaque inception, plaques on plaques on plaques. It's not clear why these plaques were made or really even what they show, though it's generally accepted that they celebrate events and people in the kingdom's history, particularly related to battles, warfare, and the expansion of the kingdom. The scholar who I just mentioned, uh Gunch, has a theory that the plaques may have served as a kind of revisionist history or kind of propagandistic celebration of the reigns of two Obas, who basically cover the 1500s, Oba Ezigi and his son Oroboa, both of whom have reputations as great conquerors, but who may not have been as popular amongst their people as history makes them seem. Given that history in Benin was told and passed down orally, it was pretty easy for Obas like Ezigi and Oroboa to fudge the record, if you will, to dictate the history being told. That's true of most history, as they say, history is written by the winners, but it's a lot easier to do when there's no physical records. These plaques may have added dimension, literally and figuratively, to that active construction and shaping of the kingdom's history, by celebrating and memorializing important and defining events in the reigns of those Obas. We know that about 900, or something like eight or nine hundred, of these plaques still exist today. There's probably more out in the world, like hidden in bunkers and underneath beds and stuff. But we know of between eight and nine hundred of them. Because this project, if Gunch is right, was completed under the reins of two Obas, started by the father and continued by the son, we can view these plaques as a kind of cohesive project. Yes, undertaken over the course of decades, but they were intended to go together, to be displayed together at the Oba's palace. And that's really easy to forget or just to not comprehend today, given that these plaques are scattered throughout the world. Apart from a few just general descriptions of European travelers who saw these things covering the walls and columns of the Oba's Palace, we really don't know anything about the order in which they were displayed. In fact, by the time that the British got their hands on them in 1897, the plaques were found in a storeroom of the palace. They had been taken down from the walls. Whether for their own protection or some other reason, we will never really know. Those are the Benin plaques. The second very, very, very broad category of Benin bronzes is freestanding sculpture, which is to say objects that can stand on their own. You can pick them up, turn them around, admire them from all angles. More generally, this category basically includes anything that isn't a plaque. As a result of that, there is a lot more internal variation among these objects, be that chronological, stylistic, functional, etc., etc., etc. Most often, these sculptures either show people or animals. The ones that show people either show full figures, whether that's an individual sculpture of, say, a Portuguese soldier, or more group-oriented works, shall we say, that are typically referred to as tableau. For example, there is a very famous work at the Met in New York that has a bronze square base on which there are small figures of attendance that flank and surround a slightly larger figure of the Queen Mother. That's what's known as a tableau. Finally, people could also be shown in bust format, which is to say from the neck up, kind of like a portrait bust. The most popular animals to appear in these sculptures were leopards, which had symbolic ties to the oba, and it's even said that the obas of the kingdom often had domesticated leopards living in the palace. Which are like, what? I know that leopards are wild animals, I would never want to keep one, but that sounds pretty dope. I've also seen a delightful bronze of a rooster that is absolutely incredible. As for their size, no matter if we're talking about a bronze bust, a bronze quote-unquote tableau, or the sculptures of a rooster or a leopard, these things were small enough and light enough that the British could pick them up and carry them away, which is, uh, spoiler alert, exactly what they did. Many of these bronzes, especially the busts, were made for adorning ancestral altars, which, as the name suggests, are basically shrines that encourage the remembrance of a particular person, such as a deceased Oba. In fact, it was a centuries-old tradition that the new Oba would commission a bust of the recently deceased Oba and place it on an altar. By the time the British rolled up in 1897, there was something like 35 of these shrines to previous Obas that were filled with bronze sculptures. There are actually photographs of what these altars looked like taken by the British before they dismantled the altars, and it shows them covered in bronzes as well as works in ivory, including full-on, intricately carved elephant tusks. And I'm talking like the whole tusk. Like the plaques that we just talked about, these shrine-bound bronzes had a central role in memorializing people and events of the past. I find it absolutely lovely and very fitting that the Edo verb for to make a memory or to remember, not even gonna try to say it, Sayyama, that cannot be right. But anyway, the the verb for to remember or to make a memory literally translates to to cast in bronze. So if I were to say, oh yeah, I remember you in Edo, it would literally translate to, I have cast you in bronze in my mind. In addition to being one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard, this saying shows how central bronze casting was to the Edo culture, to the culture of the Kingdom of Benin. That brings me to my next point. Who made these things? Bronze casting was very much an elite activity in the service of the Oba or high-ranking members of his court. They were the ones who had the monopoly on works in bronze. This work was carried out by a guild of bronze casters, so it was a specialty trade that was highly regulated and basically existed to create things for the Oba and his court. I am assuming that all of these bronze casters were men, I think that's a safe assumption, but I don't know anything particular about them. Though we do know that they probably carried out their work at the palace itself. There were bronze workshops on the premises. And that makes sense because they were basically only making works for the Oba or for the people that the Oba said could commission works. There's really no reason to be anywhere else if that's the only dude you're making stuff for. Although we don't know a ton about these men, we do know how they made what they did. There are two primary methods for making works in bronze. You can either smith bronze, so think of a blacksmith's workshop where they heat metal and then twist and hammer the crap out of it. That's smithing, which is a delightful word, smithing, or you can cast bronze, which involves pouring molten bronze into a mold or a cast. Whether we are talking about plaques or freestanding sculptures, the vast majority of bronzes to come out of the kingdom of Benin were made through casting, specifically a process called lost wax casting. To help me explain this, I spent hours making an infographic on lost wax casting. It's a little bit extra, but I did it. So if I lose you on anything I say in the next two minutes, you can go have a look at that. But I'm gonna do my best to explain how this process works. Let's assume that a bronze caster wants to make an ancestral bust of an oba for an altar. For reference, the general form of these bronze heads uh is kind of shaped like a thimble, like a head-sized thimble. Like a thimble, if you turned them upside down, you would see that they're hollow inside. So hypothetically, you could like carry water in these things. Obviously, you shouldn't because they're ancestral busts, but I think that's a helpful note. Because the first step an artist would take if making one of these heads is to get clay from the nearby river and shape it into a simplified version of the sculpture, providing shape and support for the next step, which is to cover this core with a layer of wax. The artist then carves and shapes this layer of wax until it looks exactly like how he wants the finished product to look. This is the most important part of the process, because the finished bronze will be a clone of whatever is rendered in wax. This is how these sculptures get so detailed, because you're not working with hard materials, you're working in soft, pliable wax. Once the wax layer is perfected, the artist encases the form in yet another layer of clay. So you've got a clay exterior, a wax layer in the middle, and a clay core. It's a wax sandwich. As part of this step, the artist will also include what are essentially escape routes for the wax, which is crucial, because after this clay mold hardens, the artist bakes it. He puts it in the fire. This is the step from which this process gets its name, because during this step, the wax layer melts and flows out of the clay form through those little escape routes. It is lost. When you pull this clay out of the oven or whatever you were cooking it in, you're left with a mold that has an empty space where the wax used to be. So it goes clay exterior, air, clay core. This mold can now be filled with molten bronze or brass, which will fill every nook and cranny that the wax left behind. When the bronze hardens, the artist cracks open the mold, which crumbles away and you can chisel away the clay core inside, leaving behind a hollow bronze bust, which can now be polished and refined. For smaller items, one might skip the first step of forming a clay core and simply make a form entirely from wax. So if I wanted to make like a tiny Portuguese army man, I could just carve it straight away from wax, surround it with clay, fire it, leaving a ghosty Portuguese army man in the clay, and fill that with bronze. In that case, the resulting figure would be solid bronze. That's fine for small stuff, but bronze is not only a precious material, it's also very heavy. So a solid life-size bronze head would be one, a bad investment, and two, very hard to move. So that's why for larger items you would start with that clay core thing. As you may have guessed, every sculpture made using this method of casting is singular. It is unique, because the clay mold gets destroyed every single time. So if you wanted to make multiples of something, you would have to make each one of them from scratch. Not everyone had access to bronze. And in tough times, even for the Obas, bronze was hard to come by. But it's not the only material in which the Benin artists worked or Edo artists worked. They also produced work in things like wood and ivory. In fact, when the British came in 1897, ivory was like the hot commodity, because that's a material that you can't really get in Europe. Bronze you can get, ivory you can't. It's a big deal. Some of the most famous works, like period, to come out of Benin, whether we're talking bronze, ivory, wood, whatever, are a series of ivory masks depicting one of the kingdom's greatest queens, Queen Idea, who was the wife of Oba Ozola and the mother of Oba Esigi. She was also like a warrior queen goddess who remains one of the most beloved figures in Edo history. The mask in the British collection is particularly famous because it shows Queen Idia wearing a crown, where all of the prongs on top of the crown feature the head of a Portuguese man. They got little beards, little eyes, little noses. They're very clearly Portuguese men. They also comprise the collar that she wears, almost like beads on a collar. But they're not beads, they're little Portuguese heads. In addition to being stunningly carved, exquisitely carved. I said it, exquisitely. The mask is often considered one of the most personal of the objects to come out of Benin, of the Benin bronzes, you could say, despite the fact that it's ivory. It's one that you can stand in front of, look at, and feel a personal connection with the person that it shows. It helps that the eyes are inlaid with irises, black irises, which against the ivory make it look like you're actually making eye contact. At least with one of the eyes, one of the other eyes has lost, um, I would assume it's ebony, has lost whatever made up the pupil, but still. It is an absolutely exquisite object in and of itself, but even more so because it testifies to these critical cross-cultural relationships that were happening at this time in the kingdom's history. Speaking of, the period between 1500 and 1700 not only marked the golden age of the Kingdom of Benin, but the golden age of bronze casting in the kingdom. The Benin bronzes, many of which were made during this period, stand as testaments to these heights and to this golden age. But as Robert Frost once wrote, nothing gold can stay. It turns out though that for Benin City, nothing could stay. Not gold, not copper, not bronze, not ivory. It would all be taken. But for more on that, you will have to wait until part two. Which means that is all I have for you today on the Benin Bronzes Part 1. If you are interested in learning more between now and episode 32 or part two of the Benin Bronzes, I will post a bunch of sources on the podcast website, along with images related to today's episode. I want To give yet another shout out to those three main books that I used to write today's episode. I think 80% of the episode's content came from those books, which are Dan Hicks's The British Museums, Barnaby Phillips's Loot, Britain and the Benning Bronzes, and Catherine Waisaki Gunch's book entitled The Benning Plaques. Of those three, Barnaby Phillips' Loot would be the best bet for a casual reader, so someone who is interested in the topic, but perhaps doesn't have a museum or an academic background. That said, Dan Hicks's book is also very good, very readable, whereas Gunsch's volume on the Binning Plaques is more of an academic/slash scholarly book. I enjoyed them all, of course, learned a lot from all of them, and they were a huge help in writing this episode. Those can all be found linked on the podcast's website, which is stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. That is where you can also contact me. You could also contact me at the podcast email if you're so inclined, which is stuffaboutthingspodcast at gmail.com. I absolutely love hearing from listeners. It makes my day. And I will always respond. Might not be right away, might take me a week, but I will respond. As for Gus Corner this episode, he is doing awesome. It's been pretty cold here in Wisconsin, but he's still getting his daily walks in. Today he faceplanted in a snowbank and it was hilarious. I have also recently discovered that Gus loves marshmallows. He's obsessed with them. And he looks like a little honey bear when you bring him a marshmallow as a little treat. It's very, very cute. And it makes my heart happy. It would also make my heart very, very happy if you would take two minutes out of your day to leave the podcast a review on iTunes or wherever else you listen to it. This podcast requires a lot of time and effort, and I am more than happy to continue doing it so long as I know that people are listening, enjoying it, and learning from it. That is why I do what I do. As for Me Corner, I will be back in your ear in about a week. Week and a half. Two weeks stops. With part two of the Benin Bronzes. The usual thank yous go out to hooksounds.com and freemusicarchive.org that provide royalty-free music that you hear in the intro and the outro. The first song you hear is a version of Box Brandenburg Concerto number four by Kevin McLeod, and the second gentier tune is called Success Dreams. I have been in a closet talking to myself into a microphone for three days, so I'm gonna sign off now. I thank you so much for listening. Getting to the end, it's amazing. Gold Star for you. And I just want to remind you of one other thing, just one thing. Please take the time to recognize, look at, wonder at something beautiful today. That's it.