The Bronzes of Benin

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception




The Benin bronzes are some of the most fascinating pieces of art from one of the most powerful, yet unfamiliar, ancient powers.

The bronzes are a collection of royal plaques from the Benin Empire, located in what is now known as modern Nigeria. Originally totaling around 1,000 plaques, the bronzes depict animals, fish, humans and scenes of court life, all delicately created for its powerful royalty through a complex method known as lost wax casting.

It has been said that the Benin Empire began like so many others – a small pastoral area eventually filling out into a larger village, town and city environment as more families settled down. But by the 14th century, it had branched out into trade and the arts (copper, bronze, and brass) while the 15th and 16th centuries marked its trading prowess with Portuguese merchants (palm oil, ivory, cloth, pepper, and slaves for European metals, salt, cloth, guns, and powder).

The sheer political and economic power of this empire was confirmed in the 1960s when noted archeologist Graham Connah excavated Benin's inner city wall and found:
“A seven mile long earthen rampart girded by a moat 50 feet deep. Connah estimated that its construction, if spread out over 5 dry seasons, would have required a workforce of 1,00 laborers working 10 hours a day 7 days a week.”
“Later on, the reigning king Ewuare also added great thoroughfares and erected 9 fortified gateways. Other excavations also uncovered a rural network of earthen walls four to eight thousand miles long that would have taken an estimated 150 million man hours to build and must have taken hundreds of years to build.”

An 1897 drawing gives a good idea of what it may have looked like in its prime.


By the 17th century, the Benin Empire was in decline, threatened externally by other nations that had traded for their own European weapons and by internal squabbles over ruling succession that often led to civil war. In 1897, British forces invaded and burnt down the empire city, seizing any remaining bronzes and eventually dividing them between personal collectors and museum holdings.

At this time, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Ethnology in Berlin are the biggest public holders of Benin bronze art.

In 1965, the British Museum lent thirty plaques to the University of Pennsylvania for an exhibition. In one of its rarer moments of eloquence, Time Magazine wrote the following description:
“The bronze surfaces are intricately designed for the play of light—wound copper bracelets, brazen armor and engraved rosette backgrounds, which set off the bold, stubby torsos of the figures. Most remarkable is the high level of skill displayed in employing the complex craft of casting with the lost-wax process. Benin's smiths developed casting to the point where plaques as thin as one-eighth of an inch were cast, surpassing even the best that the European Renaissance masters could achieve.”