Head of Oni

Ife was the holy city of the Yoruba populations. There were the crowned kings, the “Oni.” The population considered that Ife was in the center of the world.

Ife practiced a realistic, almost naturalistic art. They worked on various materials, mainly bronze and terracotta objects such as busts representing characters, animals, and ritual objects. They also produced objects in stone, granite and quartz, for example busts of mythical characters.

They are the first renowned castors of bronze to transmit their knowledge to Benin's castors. Its bronzes of high artistic quality are well known today distributed in several museums.

They also used gold bronze, which, like the Ashanti and Baulé bronzes, bore a small percentage of gold. These objects were manufactured between the 10th century and XV. Most of them represent heads of male characters identified as the crowned kings, the “Oni”. Some others represent full - body Onis. Many of Ife’s faces are surmounted, from top to bottom, by their tribal scarifications.

Beautiful head of Oni whose dating is unknown, only the thermoluminescence analysis could offer an exact dating, but given the thinness of its walls seems to be very old, no later than the century XV. The piece has been rebrowsed, as one of its former owners had sanded it to leave it metallic. You can see the sanding perfectly, which is what ignorance does!