It has the effect on me that certain sculptures of the Buddha have. The presence of tranquillity in a work of art speaks of a great internal civilization, because you can’t have tranquillity without reflection, without having asked the great questions about your place in the universe and having answered those questions to some degree of satisfaction. That for me is what civilization is.
The idea of black African civilization on this level was quite simply unimaginable to a European a hundred years ago. In 1910, when the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius found the first brass head in a shrine outside the city of Ife, he was so overwhelmed by its technical and aesthetic assurance that he immediately associated it with the greatest art that he knew – the Classical sculptures of ancient Greece. But what possible connection could there have been between ancient Greece and Nigeria? There’s no record of contact in the literature or in the archaeology. For Frobenius there was an obvious and exhilarating solution to the conundrum: the lost island of Atlantis must have sunk off the coast of Nigeria and the Greek survivors stepped ashore to make this astonishing sculpture.
It’s easy to mock Frobenius, but at the beginning of the twentieth century Europeans had very limited knowledge of the traditions of African art. For painters like Picasso, Nolde or Matisse, African art was Dionysiac, exuberant and frenetic, visceral and emotional. But the restrained, rational, Apollonian sculptures of Ife clearly came from an orderly world of technological sophistication, sacred power and courtly hierarchy, a world in every way comparable with the historic societies of Europe and Asia. As with all great artistic traditions, the sculptures of Ife present a particular view of what it means to be human. Babatunde Lawal, Professor of Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University, explains:
Frobenius around 1910 assumed that the survivors of the Greek lost Atlantis might have made these heads, and he predicted that if a full figure were to be found, the figure would reflect the typical Greek proportions, the head constituting about one seventh of the whole body. But when a full figure was eventually discovered at Ife the head was just about a quarter of the body, complying with the typical proportion characterizing much of African art – the emphasis on the head because it is the crown of the body, the seat of the soul, the site of identity, perception and communication.
Given this traditional emphasis, it is perhaps not surprising that nearly all of the Ife metal sculptures that we know – and there are only about thirty – are heads. The discovery of thirteen of those heads in 1938 meant there could no longer be any doubt that this was a totally African tradition. The Illustrated London News of 8 April 1939 reported the find. In an extraordinary article, the writer, still using the conventional (to us, racist) language of the 1930s, recognizes that what he calls the Negro tradition – a word then associated with slavery and primitivism – must, with the Ife sculptures, now take its place in the canon of world art. The word ‘Negro’ could never again be used in quite the same way.
One does not have to be a connoisseur or an expert to appreciate the beauty of their modelling, their virility, their reposeful realism, their dignity and their simplicity. No Greek or Roman sculpture of the best periods, not Cellini, not Houdon, ever produced anything that made a more immediate appeal to the senses or is more immediately satisfying to European ideas of proportion.
It is hard to exaggerate what a profound reversal of prejudice and hierarchy this represented. Along with Greece and Rome, Florence and Paris, now stood Nigeria. If you want an example of how things can change thought, the impact of the Ife heads in 1939 are I think as good as you’ll find.
Recent research suggests that the heads we know were all made over quite a short stretch of time, possibly in the middle of the fifteenth century. At that point Ife had already been a leading political, economic and spiritual centre for centuries. It was a world of forest farming dominated by cities, which developed in the lands west of the Niger river. And it was river networks that connected Ife to the regional trade networks of West Africa and to the great routes that carried ivory and gold by camel across the Sahara to the Mediterranean coast. In return came the metals that would make the Ife heads. The world of the Mediterranean had provided not the artists, as Frobenius supposed, merely the raw materials.
The forest cities were presided over by their senior ruler, the Ooni of Ife. The Ooni’s role was not just political – he also had a great range of spiritual and ritual duties, and the city of Ife has always been the leading religious centre of the Yoruba people. There is still an Ooni today. He has high ceremonial status and moral authority, and his headgear still echoes that of the sculpted head of about 600 years ago.
Our head is almost certainly the portrait of an Ooni, but it is not at all obvious how such a portrait would have been used. It was clearly not meant to stand on its own, so it might well have been mounted on a wooden body – there is what looks like a nail hole at the neck that could have been used to attach it. It has been suggested that it might have been carried in processions or that in certain ceremonies it could have stood in for an absent or even for a dead Ooni.
Around the mouth there are a series of small holes. Again, we can’t be quite certain what these are for, but they were possibly used to attach a beaded veil that would hide the mouth and the lower part of the face. We know that the Ooni today still covers his face completely on some ritual occasions – a powerful marker of his distinct status as a person apart, not like other human beings.
There is a sense in which the Ife sculptures have also become embodiments of a whole continent, of a modern, post-colonial Africa confident in its ancient cultural traditions. Babatunde Lawal explains:
Today, many Africans, and Nigerians in particular, are proud of their past, a past that was once denigrated as being crude, primitive. Then to realize that their ancestors were not as backward as they were portrayed was a double source of joy to them. This discovery unfurled a new kind of nationalism in them, and they started walking tall, feeling proud of their past. Contemporary artists now seek inspiration from this past to energize their quest for identity in the global village that our world has become.
The discovery of the art of Ife is a textbook example of a widespread cultural and political phenomenon: that as we discover our past, so we discover ourselves – and more. To become what we want to be, we have to decide what we were. Like individuals, nations and states define and redefine themselves by revisiting their histories, and the sculptures of Ife are now markers of a distinctive national and regional identity.
64
The David Vases
Porcelain, from Yushan county, China
AD 1351
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
The thrilling opening lines of Coleridge’s opium-fuelled fantasy still send a tingle down the spine. As a teenager I was mesmerized by his vision of exotic and mysterious pleasures, but I had no idea that Coleridge was in fact writing about a historical figure. Qubilai Khan was a thirteenth-century Chinese emperor. Xanadu is merely the English form of Shangdu, his imperial summer capital. Qubilai Khan was the grandson of Genghis Khan, ruler of the Mongols from 1206 and terror of the world. Wreaking havoc everywhere, Genghis Khan established the Mongol Empire – a superpower that ran from the Black Sea to the Sea of Japan and from Cambodia to the Arctic. Qubilai Khan extended the empire even further and became emperor of China.
Under the Mongol emperors, China developed one of the most enduring and successful luxury products in the history of the world – a product fit for stately pleasure-domes, but which spread in a matter of centuries from grand palaces to simple parlours all over the world: Chinese blue and white porcelain. We now think of blue and white as quintessentially Chinese, but that is not how it began. This archetypal Chinese aesthetic in fact comes from Iran. Thanks to the long Chinese habit of writin
g on objects, we know exactly who commissioned these two blue and white porcelain vases, which gods they were offered to, and indeed the very day on which they were dedicated.
The importance of Chinese porcelain is hard to overstate. Admired and imitated for more than a thousand years, it has influenced virtually every ceramic tradition in the world, and it has played a crucial role in cross-cultural exchanges. In Europe, blue and white porcelain is practically synonymous with China, and is always associated with the Ming Dynasty. But the David Vases, now in the British Museum, make us rethink this history, for they predate the Ming and were made under Qubilai Khan’s Mongol dynasty, known as the Yuan, which controlled all of China until the middle of the fourteenth century.
Seven hundred years ago most of Asia and a large part of Europe were reeling from the invasions of the Mongols. We all know Genghis Khan as the ultimate destroyer, and the sack of Baghdad by his son still lives in Iraqi folk memory. Genghis’s grandson Qubilai was also a great warrior, but under him Mongol rule became more settled and more ordered. As emperor of China he supported scholarship and the arts, and he encouraged the manufacture of luxury goods. Once the empire was established, a ‘Pax Mongolica’ ensued, a Mongolian Peace which, like the Pax Romana, ensured a long period of stability and prosperity. The Mongol Empire spread along the ancient Silk Road and made it safe. It was thanks to the Pax Mongolica that Marco Polo was able to travel from Italy to China in the middle of the thirteenth century and then return to tell Europe what he’d seen.
One of the startling things he had seen was porcelain; indeed, the very word ‘porcelain’ comes to us from Marco Polo’s description of his travels in Qubilai Khan’s China. The Italian porcellana, ‘little piglet’, is a slang word for cowry shells, which do indeed look a little like curled-up piglets. And the only thing that Marco Polo could think of to give his readers an idea of the shell-like sheen of the hard, fine ceramics that he saw in China was a cowry shell, a porcellana. And so we’ve called it ‘little piglets’, porcelain, ever since – that is if we’re not just calling it ‘china’. I don’t think there’s another country in the world whose name has become interchangeable with its defining export.
The David Vases are so called because they were bought by Sir Percival David, whose collection of more than 1,500 Chinese ceramics is now in a special gallery at the British Museum. We’ve put the vases right at the entrance to the gallery to make it quite clear that they are the stars of the show: David acquired them separately from two different private collections, and was able to reunite them in 1935. They’re big, just over 60 centimetres (24 inches) high and about 20 centimetres (8 inches) across at the widest, with an elegant shape, narrower at top and bottom, swelling in the centre. Apparently floating between the white porcelain body and the clear glaze on top lies the blue, made of cobalt and painted in elaborate figures and patterns with great assurance. There are leaves and flowers at the foot and neck of the vases, but the main body of each vase has a slender Chinese dragon flying around it – elongated, scaled and bearded, with piercing claws and surrounded by trailing clouds. At the neck are two handles in the shape of elephant heads. These two vases are obviously luxury porcelain productions made by artist-craftsmen delighting in their material.
Porcelain is a special ceramic fired at very high temperatures: 1200–1400 degrees Celsius. The heat vitrifies the clay so that like glass it can hold liquid, in contrast to porous earthenware, and also makes it very tough. White, hard and translucent porcelain was admired and desired everywhere, well before the creation of blue and white.
The savagery of the Mongol invasion destabilized and destroyed local pottery industries across the Middle East, especially in Iran. So, when peace returned, these became major new markets for Chinese exports. Blue and white ware had long been popular in the markets, so the porcelain the Chinese made for them mirrored the local style, and Chinese potters used the Iranian blue pigment cobalt to meet local Iranian taste. The cobalt from Iran was known in China as huihui qing – Muslim blue – clear evidence that the blue and white tradition is Middle Eastern and not Chinese. Professor Craig Clunas, an expert on Chinese cultural history, places this phenomenon in a wider context:
Iran and what is now Iraq are the kinds of areas where this sort of colouring comes in. This is a technique that comes from elsewhere, and therefore it tells us something about this period when China is unprecedentedly open to the rest of Asia as part of this huge empire of the Mongols, which stretches all the way from the Pacific almost to the Mediterranean. Certainly the openness to the rest of Asia is what brings about things like blue and white, and it probably had an impact on forms of literature. So from the point of view of cultural forms coming into being the Yuan period is extraordinarily important.
The David Vases are among the happy consequences of this cultural openness. Their crucial significance is that as well as their decoration, they have inscriptions – inscriptions that tell us that they were dedicated on Tuesday 13 May 1351 – a level of precision that is wonderfully Chinese and proof positive that fine-quality blue and white porcelain predates the Ming. But the inscriptions tell us much more than that. There are slight differences between the inscriptions on the two vases. This is the translation of the one on the left:
Zhang Wenjin, from Jingtang community, Dejiao village, Shuncheng township, Yushan county, Xinzhou circuit, a disciple of the Holy Gods, is pleased to offer a set comprising one incense burner and a pair of flower vases to General Hu Jingyi at the Original Palace in Xingyuan, as a prayer for the protection and blessing of the whole family and for the peace of his sons and daughters. Carefully offered on an auspicious day in the Fourth Month, Eleventh Year of the Zhizheng reign.
There’s a lot of information here. We’re told that the vases were purpose-made to be offered as donations at a temple and that the name of their donor is Zhang Wenjin, who describes himself with great solemnity as ‘a disciple of the Holy Gods’. It gives his home town, Shuncheng, in what is now Jiangxi province, a few hundred miles south-west of Shanghai. He is offering these two grand vases along with an incense burner (the three would have formed a typical set for an altar), though the incense burner has not yet been found. The specific deity receiving the offering – General Hu Jingyi, a military figure of the thirteenth century who was elevated to divine status because of his supernatural power and wisdom and his ability to foretell the future – had only recently become a god. Zhang Wenjin’s altar set is offered in exchange for this new god’s protection.
Foreign rulers, the Mongols; foreign materials, Muslim blue; and foreign markets, Iran and Iraq – all played an essential, if paradoxical, part in the creation of what to many outside China is still the most Chinese of objects, blue and white porcelain. Soon these ceramics were being exported from China in very large quantities, to Japan and south-east Asia, across the Indian Ocean to Africa, the Middle East, and beyond.
Eventually, centuries after its creation in Muslim Iran and its transformation in Mongol China, blue and white arrived in Europe and triumphed. Like all successful products, it was widely copied by local manufacturers. Willow-pattern, the style that many people think of when blue and white is mentioned, was in fact invented – or should we say pirated? – in England in the 1790s by Thomas Minton. It was an instant success, and of course it was as much a fantasy view of China as Coleridge’s poem. Coleridge may indeed even have been drinking his tea out of a Willow-pattern cup as he emerged from his opium dream of Kubla Khan’s Xanadu.
65
Taino Ritual Seat
Wooden stool, from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
AD 1200–1500
Recent chapters have described high-status objects that belonged to leaders and thinkers around the world about 700 years ago, objects reflecting the societies that produced them in Scandinavia and Nigeria, Spain and China. This object is a stool from the Caribbean, from what is now the Dominican Republic. It too tells a rich story – in this case of the Taino people, who
lived in the Caribbean islands before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. In this history of the world the stool is the first object since the Clovis spear point (Chapter 5) in which the separate narratives of the Americas on the one hand, and Europe, Asia and Africa on the other, intersect – or, perhaps more accurately, collide. But this is no ordinary domestic thing – it is a stool of great power, a strange and exotic ceremonial seat carved into the shape of an otherworldly being, half-human, half-animal, which would take its owners travelling between worlds and which gave them the power of prophecy. We do not know if the seat helped them foretell it, but we do know that the people who made this seat had a terrible future ahead of them.
Within a century of the arrival of the Spanish in 1492 most of the Taino died of European diseases and their land was shared out among the European conquerors. It was a pattern that was repeated across the Americas, but the Taino were among the first with whom Europeans made contact, and they suffered more, perhaps, than any other Native American people. They had no writing, and so it is only thanks to a small number of objects like this stool that we can even begin to grasp how the Taino imagined their world and how they sought to control it.
A History of the World in 100 Objects Page 36
