The Benin Bronzes

The plaques were cast by the guild of brass casters using the lost wax method, in which a wax model is coated in clay, melted out and replaced with molten metal. The detail is astonishing: the beads of a collar, the scales of a fish, the pattern of a cloth. Brass came to Benin through trade with the Portuguese from the late fifteenth century, in the form of bracelets called manillas, and the plaques were nailed to the wooden pillars of the palace as a record of the kingdom's history and power. Look at the Portuguese figures, whose foreign faces the casters observed with curiosity.

In eighteen ninety seven a British force attacked Benin City after a British party had been killed, burned the palace and carried off thousands of objects, which were sold to pay for the expedition and dispersed to museums across Europe and America. The British Museum holds about nine hundred of them. Nigeria has requested their return since the nineteen sixties, and in recent years several museums have begun returning theirs, while a law prevents the British Museum from giving objects away. The gallery label sets out this history plainly. The plaques remain among the greatest works of metal sculpture anywhere in the world.

Did You Know? The brass for the plaques came partly from manillas, horseshoe shaped bracelets that Portuguese traders brought by the shipload in exchange for pepper, ivory and enslaved people.