Ife bronze and terracotta heads

Between about the 12th and 15th centuries, artists at Ile-Ife in southwestern Nigeria made strikingly naturalistic human heads in terracotta and in copper alloys. The metal heads are life-sized or nearly so, with calm faces, fine vertical lines (perhaps scarification or a beaded veil) and holes along the hairline and lips, possibly to attach hair or a crown. One famous mask, associated with the king Obalufon, is cast in almost pure copper, which is very hard to cast. Ife's workshops also made glass beads from local materials, rare in West Africa.¹²³

Ile-Ife is the sacred city of the Yoruba, revered as the place where creation began and where the first king, Oduduwa, ruled; its ruler, the Ooni, remains a leading Yoruba monarch. The heads were cast by the lost-wax method and may depict rulers or officials, used in royal rituals. When the German ethnographer Leo Frobenius saw a bronze head at Ife in 1910, he insisted it must come from the lost Atlantis rather than African artists. A cache of copper-alloy heads found in 1938 at the Wunmonije compound helped end such prejudice, establishing Ife among the great sculptural traditions of the medieval world.²³⁴