Linden-Museum Stuttgart: 005367

Linden-Museum-Stuttgart
Linden-Museum Stuttgart: 005367
License: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

 

Object description
This information was provided by the German museum where the object is currently located or where it was located prior to restitution.

Object Name High relief (copper alloy) plaque depicting an ibis
Description This relief plate from the royal palace shows a long-billed wading bird. Birds have far-reaching symbolic meanings among the Edo: they stand for "witches" and other magically acting beings. As messengers, they connect heaven and earth (and in this case, water). The creation myth tells of a bird at the top of the "world tree" that gave a snail shell to the youngest of the three sons of the supreme god Olokun. When the three sons climbed down the world tree and found a vast expanse of water below, the sand that formed the first land in the primordial sea trickled out of this snail shell. The background of the plate is decorated with four-rayed rosettes. They stand for the cardinal points, the four times of day, the 4-day week then common in the south of today's Nigeria, and for the god Olokun. Text: Dietmar Neitzke.
Type Relief
Materials Copper alloy
Size, Dimensions Width: 30 cm. Height: 43 cm.
Dating of Object

Museum / Collection / Acquisition
This information was provided by the German museum where the object is currently located or where it was located prior to restitution.

Museum Linden-Museum Stuttgart
Museum Inv.-No 005367
Collector Felix von Luschan (Berlin) purchased a large number of royal objects produced in the Benin Kingdom and sold parts of the collection to other museums. The objects reserved for Stuttgart were paid by Karl Knorr (Heilbronn, Germany).
Acquisition date 1899
Circumstances of acquisition In October 1898, the Hamburg company "H. Bey & Co" offered the Berlin Ethnological Museum a Benin collection that came directly from Africa. However, due to a lack of funds, the entire collection could not be purchased and was therefore to be passed on to other interested parties. Felix von Luschan of the Berlin Museum therefore informed Karl Graf von Linden in November 1898, and offered him a right of first refusal. The Linden Museum then made 15,000 M available for the purchase of objects. The purchase price was paid by the Heilbronn entrepreneur Karl Knorr, which is why the collection became known as "Die Karl Knorr'sche Sammlung von Benin-Altertümern". Von Luschan published a detailed description of the collection under the same title (1901) on behalf of Count Linden and Knorr. Other buyers of the collection included the museums in Vienna and Munich, but also people such as Hans Meyer (Leipzig) and Eugen Rautenstrauch (Cologne). Text: Markus Himmelsbach.
   
Notes

Current ownership status and location

Status restituted
Date of last status change 14 December 2022
Current ownership Federal Republic of Nigeria
Holding institution National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM, Nigeria)
Current location Linden Museum Stuttgart (permanent loan)

Categorization for the search functions
This information was included by the German Contact Point for Collections from Colonial Contexts and is intended to make the object easier to find in the database.

Object Type relief
Materials metal; copper alloy
Tags

Dataset

ID 109
last Change 2023-01-26 12:15:00
License Linden-Museum Stuttgart