In 1910 the German explorer Leo Frobenius came upon a lifelike cast metal head of great refinement at Ife, in what is now southwestern Nigeria. Unable to believe that African artists had made it, he suggested it came from the lost civilization of Atlantis. Frobenius credited the Ife heads to Atlantis because he assumed Africans could not have made them. Later excavations showed that Yoruba artists at Ife had cast such heads between roughly the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. A survey that looks only at Europe repeats his mistake on a larger scale.
Is "art" a universal category?
The modern European idea of fine art, objects made mainly to be looked at and admired for their beauty, took shape in the eighteenth century. Many societies drew the line differently or not at all. Many cultures had no separate category of objects made only to be looked at; carvings, textiles and paintings also protected, healed, honored ancestors or carried prayers. Art historians therefore ask what an object did as well as how it looks. Calling a mask "sculpture" can be useful, but it can also hide the dance, music and ritual it was made for.
China: brush, poem and mountain
Chinese painting developed a long written theory. Around the sixth century the critic Xie He set out six principles for judging painting. The first of Xie He's principles, often translated as spirit resonance, asks that a painting convey living energy, placing that quality ahead of accurate likeness or color. Landscape, called shanshui or "mountain water" painting, became the most respected subject, with towering peaks and tiny travelers suggesting the place of people in a vast world.
From the Song and Yuan dynasties onward, an ideal of the literati painter grew strong. Literati painters were scholar officials who painted as cultivated amateurs, valuing personal expression over polished technique. They often added poems in their own handwriting to their pictures. The three perfections of Chinese art were poetry, calligraphy and painting, ideally united in one work by one person.
Japan: pictures of the floating world
In Edo period Japan, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, a booming city culture created a demand for cheap, colorful images. Ukiyo-e were Japanese woodblock prints of the floating world: actors, courtesans, travel scenes and landscapes, sold cheaply in large numbers. A publisher coordinated a designer, a carver who cut a separate block for each color and a printer who pressed paper onto the inked blocks. Katsushika Hokusai's Under the Wave off Kanagawa, made around 1831, shows fishing boats beneath a huge clawing wave, with Mount Fuji small in the distance. It became one of the most reproduced images in the world.
Africa: presence and power
Africa holds many distinct traditions, not one. The Nok culture of central Nigeria made terracotta figures more than two thousand years ago. Ife produced its naturalistic heads; the kingdom of Benin cast brass plaques for its royal palace, a story taken up later in this course. Among the Kongo peoples of Central Africa, specialists made carved figures called minkisi, which held powerful substances. In one type, the nkisi nkondi, nails and blades were driven into the figure to activate its power, often to seal an oath or agreement. Each nail recorded a vow or a request, so the figure grew denser with use.
India and the Americas
In South India, artists of the Chola dynasty, between about the tenth and twelfth centuries, cast bronze images of Hindu gods by the lost-wax method, to be carried in temple processions. The most famous shows Shiva as Nataraja, lord of the dance. Shiva Nataraja dances within a ring of fire that stands for the endless cycle of creation and destruction, one foot raised and one crushing a small figure representing ignorance.
In the Americas, the Olmec of the Gulf Coast of Mexico carved colossal basalt heads, some nearly three meters tall, around three thousand years ago. Maya artists painted vessels and carved stelae recording royal deeds alongside writing. In the Andes, fine woven cloth was among the most valued goods in the Inca state, given as royal gifts and burned as offerings; Spanish conquerors who prized gold above all misread what the Inca treasured.
Worked example: an nkisi nkondi
Imagine a wooden nkisi nkondi from the late nineteenth century in a museum case. Start with form. A standing male figure, about a meter tall, leans slightly forward with one arm raised, as if ready to strike. Hundreds of iron nails and blades cover the torso. A box on the belly, sealed with a mirror or resin, once held medicines.
Content: the figure is a hunter of wrongdoers. When two parties made an agreement, or someone sought help against a thief or illness, a specialist called an nganga would drive a nail into the figure to call on its force. Breaking the oath invited its punishment.
Context: many such figures were seized by colonial officers and missionaries, who sometimes saw them as fetishes to be destroyed. In the museum the figure is silent and still. In its community it was active, consulted and feared. Looking well means imagining both.