The Benin Plaques: A 16th Century Imperial Monument

Amongst the antiquities of West Africa, the rectangular cast brass plaques from Benin City are something of an oddity in the application of sculptural technical means to an essentially two-dimensional form. Indeed, because of this, William Fagg, the great British pioneer of African art studies, found that he could use the plaques as the “sheet anchor” (Fagg 1963: 33) of his chronology, enabling him to define an earlier pre-plaque period and a later postplaque period. And while his early–middle–late scheme, when taken too literally, might seem an oversimplification, the judgment of Fagg's form-perceptive eyes is nevertheless in general confirmed by metallurgical analysis (Craddock and Picton 1986). With the advent of European ready-made brass via trade with the Portuguese from the late fifteenth century and with other European nations from the 1530s, once the Portuguese monopoly in trade with Benin City was ended, the zinc content of...