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A Note on the Afro-Portuguese Ivories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Extract

In his book Afro-Portuguese Ivories (Batchworth Press, London, n.d.), William Fagg established the identity of an interesting hybrid art-form in a number of ivory objects—spoons, forks, salt-cellars and horns—carved for European use and to European design, but fashioned according to the canons of the African artist. While certain that the carvers were Africans, Fagg is unable to assign them to any particular region, or even to be certain that they were working in Africa. His tentative conclusion is that three regions have a claim to be considered as the home of these ivories: the area around what is now Freetown in Sierra Leone, the Bakongo coast, and the old Slave Coast between Whydah and Lagos. Von Luschan's theory of a Benin origin is firmly ruled out. Among his three alternatives, Fagg inclines to the Slave Coast, and in particular to its Yoruba sector, because of stylistic affinities between the ivories and Yoruba carving. Such a hypothesis runs into serious chronological difficulties, for whereas many representational features of the ivory carvings suggest that they belong to the sixteenth century, the Portuguese did not frequent the Whydah—Lagos coast until the seventeenth century, and even then the trade was with Brazil, not Portugal.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1964

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References

1 Archivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon. Nucleo Antigo, maço 166, The volume is badly damaged.Google Scholar

2 Alqueire=13 litres.Google Scholar

3 I.e. the governor of the fortress of Sāo Jorge da Mina and the principal Portuguese official in Guinea.Google Scholar

4 Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis (Lisbon, 1892). This work is generally believed to have been written between 1506 and 1508 and is therefore contemporary with the account book of the Casa de Guiné.Google Scholar

5 Esmeraldo, book i, chapter 32. The Portuguese editions have collares de marfim, i.e. ivory collars or necklaces. This is almost certainly an incorrect reading of the manuscript colhares de marfim, i.e. ivory spoons. In the customs accounts cited above the spoons are consistently termed colhares, which in modern Portuguese would be coiheres. There are other mistakes of this nature in the printed text of the Esmeraldo.Google Scholar

6 Esmeraldo, book I, chapter 33.Google Scholar

7 A voyage to Benin beyond the countrey of Guinea made by Master James Welsh who set forth in the yeare 1588, in Hakluyt's Voyages (Everyman edition, iv, 297).Google Scholar

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