Source [1,2,4]: digitalbenin.org/catalogue/51_1412971Ethnology
Source [3]: “The Benin Bronzes Aren’t Just Ancient History. Meet the Contemporary Casters Who Are Still Making Them Today” by Barnaby Phillips on @artnet. The article is an excerpt from his book “Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes”
Source [5]: digitalbenin.org/catalogue/5_Af195423969; @britishmuseum
Source notes [1,2,4]: “This intricately decorated cast brass pipe head may have been made for ceremonial use or as a commemorative piece for a palace altar. It has a figure of a leopard, the royal animal, on the connecting handle”
Source notes [3]: “Using skills learnt from their forefathers – the brass casters of Benin City. Photo: Barnaby Phillips”
Excerpt: “The miracle of Igun Street is not what is sold at the front of its humble stores, but what happens in the workshops and studios behind. On patches of broken land, surrounded by cast-offs and piles of breeze blocks, men sit on plastic chairs and wooden benches and work on their bronze and brass casting. They are the roughly 120 members of an exclusive guild, Igun Eronmwon. They use skills learnt from their fathers, who in turn learnt from their fathers, and so on and so on, all the way back, they say, to the thirteenth century.“
Source notes [5]: “Smoking pipe; pipe-bowl and stem made of pottery.”
