Ezio Bassani British Museum Pres London.

Ezio Bassani

British Museum Pres London, 2001 xxxix + 328 pp 615 b/w photos, CD-ROM 85 [pound sterling] hardcover.

The publication of this volume the culmination of decades of work by the agency of Ezio Bassani, is a major marked occurrence in the art history of Africa. It answers the call made by dint of Jan Vansina in 1984 for "a systematic regard catalogue [for Africa] listing all known phenomenons and all iconographic representations for different periods of time" (1) and exhibit tos how much can be achieved for the history of African art through a thorough investigation of original archival and visual records. This is Bassani's next to the first such endeavor: in 1986 he identified a number of African works of art and artifacts known to have been in Europe before 1700 for an exhibition at the Musee Dapper in Paris; (2) however his new work, which includes a CD-ROM of the passage (3) is on an altogether more ambitious scale.

In his foreword Bassani explains the organization of the catalogue and briefly compendiums up what a survey of the material reveals. There is an opening essay onward early collections and collectors of African art, and four appendixes dealing with specific assign places tos of early African art: oliphants from Calabar; couple seventeenth-century Kongo wooden figures, attributed by the agency of Bassani to a Master of Bamba Ngo; Kongo art in general; and the Afro-Portuguese ivories. With the exception of the appendix forward the wooden figures, these repeat or summarize discussions that the author has given elsewhere, still it is useful to have them brought together.

The sub-Saharan material is divided into three form into groupss totaling 818 objects: (4) first, items that can be documented as having been in European (or American) collections before 1800 and whose near location is known or unknown (nos. 1-681); inferior items known from illustrations to have been in Europe or America before 1800 on the other hand are otherwise unidentifiable (nos. 682-96); and third, items whose near location is known and which we can assume, from analogy with other documented realitys to have been in Europe by way of 1800, although their presence cannot be documented (nos. 697-818)

The catalogue is an impressive work of scholarship. It lists, region by country, the original museums or private collections in which early sub-Saharan artifacts have been identified and gives a brief account of their history. Bassani provides a separate description for each correlate including its dimensions, the materials of which it is made, its ready location, and (where this can be determined) its provenance and the ethnic cluster with which it is associated. He cites early manuscript or printed sources, together with the earliest verbatim description of the goal in those sources. Most items are illustrated through a photograph. One can solitary guess at the research and detective work that has gone into the bald details recorded for each piece. Bassani generously acknowledges the help of museum curators and other scholars who contributed information to the catalogue--the list of names takes up couple and a half pages--but he has undoubtedly been the pioneer and the prime mover in the whole enterprise.

The space of the objects described will surprise many. They range from virtuoso works--elaborate ivory carvings of the like kind as the Afro-Portuguese saltcellars and oliphants--to degrade everyday items such as leather sandals, raffia mats and bags, and articles of clothing. The catalogue, includes an assortment of weapons: subdues and arrows, swords and spears. However, masks and ungainly figure sculptures that we nowadays take to be typical of African art hardly feature at all. There is a solitary mask (from Senegambia: no. 282) and and nothing else four wooden figures (two from Kongo pair from Sierra Leone/Guinea: nos. 268 514-15 573) (5)

With this catalogue Ezio Bassani has state future researchers in African art history in his transgression and confirmed his reputation as a leading authority in the field. His decision to include goals that either have not survived or cannot now be located is a sensible common Some may come to light in the futurity and in any event it is better to have a fuller record of the sorts of African artifacts that Europeans of past centuries reflection worth collecting. Where one might quibble, however, given that the catalogue aims to list phenomenons in Europe by 1800, is Bassani's inclusion of one objects that are only known from nineteenth-century records, like as the items from the Crosthwaite and Hutton Museums (listed in a catalogue and a handbill dated 1826 and 1831 respectively); those ends may well have been acquired after 1800 forward the other hand a futurity edition of the catalogue, or complement to it, should find a place for the incontrovertibly pre-1800 "piece of woven fabric from Eboe, and from the Gold Coast, in Africa" listed in the 1786 catalogue of Richard Greene's Lichfield Museum, (6) and the African "rarities" recorded as being at Adams's coffee house or tavern, the Royal Swan, in London in the 1750 (7)

I have a suggestion to make about single of the objects listed. The ivory carving (no. 265) now in the set by of the Bibliotheque de Saint-Genevieve in Paris, which is described speculatively as a "staff" or "club" is infallibly a section of a siwa horn, examples of which are still to be erect today in certain coastal towns of east Africa of that kind as Lamu. Since it is firmly documented as having been in France in the 1690 it corroborates Swahili oral traditions that trace those horns back several centuries. It is, individual notices, the only object in the catalogue that can be definitively linked to east Africa.