Ife heads

The Ife heads are sculptures of human heads made in the city of Ilé-Ifẹ̀, usually just called Ife, in south-western Nigeria. Some are cast in metal, mostly copper alloys; many more are made of terracotta, which is clay shaped by hand and then fired. Most were made between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries; the Metropolitan Museum of Art describes Ife as a flourishing artistic centre between about 1200 and 1500, with its sculpture at its height in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries.

What makes them famous is their naturalism. The faces look like real people: the cheeks, lips, eyelids and ears are carefully modelled, and the proportions are balanced and calm. At the same time they are not snapshots. Many share an idealised, serene expression, as if the artists wanted to show a perfect version of a person, not every wrinkle and flaw.

The heads belong to a much larger body of Ife art that includes full figures, animals, vessels and ritual objects. The Met notes that their discovery challenged European assumptions about African art, and the heads have become symbols of Nigeria and of African creativity more generally.

Start with the surface of the face. On many Ife heads, fine parallel lines run from the forehead down over the cheeks and chin. The lips are usually left smooth. Scholars do not agree on what these lines mean. They might show scarification or face marks, a veil of beads, or simply an artistic way of catching light on the skin. Some heads have no lines at all.

Next, look at the edges. Many metal heads have small holes along the hairline, around the mouth or on the jaw. These suggest that something was attached: perhaps real hair for a beard and moustache, a veil of beads or, as Blier suggests for holes around the hairline, a crown. Some heads also have larger holes in the neck, which suggests they were fixed to something else, perhaps a wooden body or a stand.

Then look at the head as a whole. Some wear elaborate crowns made of rows of beads, with tassels and a crest on top. The famous head in the British Museum, cast in leaded brass, wears such a crown, painted red to represent carnelian beads, with a plume on top, and still shows traces of red paint. The Art Fund record gives its height as 36 centimetres, a little smaller than life size.

Finally, notice the large size of heads in full-figure sculptures from Ife. In Yoruba thought, orí refers both to the physical head and to an inner head associated with a person’s destiny. This offers one context for the prominence of heads in Ife art, although the meanings that individual medieval sculptures had for their makers remain debated.

The metal heads were made by lost-wax casting, one of the oldest and most demanding ways of making metal sculpture. First the artist built a core of clay roughly in the shape of the head. Over it went a layer of wax, into which all the details of the face were carved and modelled. The wax model was then covered with more clay, leaving small channels. When the mould was heated, the wax melted and ran out, leaving a thin empty space in the shape of the sculpture.

Molten metal was poured into this space. When it had cooled, the outer mould was broken away and the metal head was cleaned and polished. Each casting consumes its wax model and its heat-resistant mould; in the “indirect” method, however, a reusable intermediate mould allows the same design to be cast again from new wax models. Casting thin, even walls of metal on a near life-size head requires great skill, and the Ife casters were highly accomplished.

Although these works are often called “bronzes,” most are actually made of copper mixed with zinc and lead, which is closer to brass. Museums now often use the more accurate term “copper alloy.” Some Ife works, including the famous life-size Obalufon mask, cast in about 99 per cent pure copper, are of almost pure copper, which melts at a higher temperature and is more viscous than leaded brass, and so is especially hard to cast.

The terracotta heads were made differently: clay was modelled by hand, often with great delicacy, then dried and fired. Terracotta sculpture had a long history in Nigeria, going back to the Nok terracottas of central Nigeria in the first millennium BC, although a direct link between Nok and Ife is unproven; the Ife metal works may have been modelled on terracotta prototypes.

Ilé-Ifẹ̀ is regarded by the Yoruba as the place where the world and humankind were created. In the tradition summarized by the Met, the deities Oduduwa and Ọbàtálá began the creation of the world on the instruction of the creator Olódùmarè; Ọbàtálá is associated with making the first humans from clay, and Oduduwa is remembered as the first divine king of the Yoruba. Yoruba kings still trace their lineage to the founding of Ife, and the Ooni, the ruler of Ife, holds a special spiritual position among them.

Historians and archaeologists describe a long growth. According to the Met, Ife began around the sixth century as a cluster of some thirteen hamlets. Around 1000 CE its courtyards and passageways began to be paved, a practice linked to the growth of the town. The archaeologist-historian Akinwumi Ogundiran describes Ile-Ife between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries as the centre of the Yoruba world, an emporium and holy city, and argues that it built the first empire in the Yoruba world in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

A distinctive feature of classical Ife was its pavements. Floors and courtyards were paved with pottery, typically broken sherds set on edge. Art historians use these pavements to divide Ife’s history into eras: an Archaic period before about 800, a Pre-Pavement period (about 800–1000), a Pavement period beginning around 1000, and a Post-Pavement period. According to the Met, the specialised sculptural tradition of Ife emerged after about 800 and reached its height in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, within the Pavement period.

Ife was wealthy because of trade and craft. Excavations at Igbo Olokun in Ife have recovered glass beads and production debris dated mainly to the eleventh to fifteenth centuries; the analysts conclude that this glass, of a distinctive high-lime, high-alumina composition, was made largely independently of glass traditions elsewhere, making Igbo Olokun one of the earliest known glass workshops in West Africa. Ogundiran describes Ife’s economy as resting on this glass-bead industry. Ife exchanged beads and forest products for goods from the north; where the copper and brass of the heads came from is still debated.

The metal heads are widely thought to represent Oonis or members of the royal court. They were not casual portraits: the materials were rare and precious, and the effort needed to cast them was enormous. They belonged to the world of kingship, ritual and ancestor honour.

Ife oral accounts, examined by Suzanne Preston Blier, present Ooni Obalufon II, also called Obalufon Alayemore, as one of the city’s early rulers: he was dethroned by Oranmiyan, returned to power and brought the city’s factions into accord, and he is credited with the invention of brass casting at Ife. Blier notes the general problems of using oral traditions as history, but finds the accounts of his reign unusually consistent.

After his death he was deified and is honoured as an òrìṣà (deity). The life-size copper mask known as the Obalufon mask, which the Ooni of Ife said in 1937 had been kept on an altar in the Omirin room of the palace since it was made, is identified with him; Blier links it to Ife coronations, during which, according to one account, the royal crown was first placed on “the head of Obalufon” before the new ruler could wear it.

Traditions also link Ife to other kingdoms. Oranmiyan, the Ife prince who in these accounts displaced Obalufon II, is also said to have ruled at Oyo and Benin, and Benin traditions connect the beginnings of its royal dynasty and of its brass casting with Ife. Historians treat such traditions carefully, but they show how Ife was seen as a source of legitimacy and skill.

A few Ife works had already reached Europe, among them stone pieces given in 1896 to the British colonial governor Gilbert Carter, but it was the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius, who spent about three weeks in Ife in 1910, who brought Ife sculpture to wide European attention. He excavated terracottas and, after repeated enquiries about a famous statue of the sea god Olokun, was taken to the Olokun grove and shown a brass head. He pressed the grove’s priest to sell it, reportedly for six British pounds. Local elders were alarmed, and British colonial officials intercepted his party on the way to the coast and made him surrender many of the excavated objects, including the Olokun head; only a fragment broken from its crown reached Germany. He did take several terracotta heads, which are now in Berlin.

In 1938 workmen digging foundations at the Wunmonije Compound in Ife, near the royal palace, found by chance a group of copper-alloy sculptures: some seventeen heads and the upper half of a figure. Most stayed in Nigeria and are now in the national museum at Ife, but some were sold behind the backs of the authorities. The head now in the British Museum was bought secretly by Henry Maclear Bate, a heavily indebted British journalist and editor, who carried it out of Nigeria; it entered the museum in 1939 through the National Art Collections Fund. The American anthropologist William Bascom, then a doctoral student in Ife, bought and exported two heads, apparently from the same seller who supplied Bate.

The 1938 discovery led to efforts to control the export of antiquities from Nigeria. In 1948 Ife sculptures, including the Olokun head and the Obalufon mask, were exhibited and studied at the British Museum. Later excavations at sites in Ife, such as Ita Yemoo, added more finds and helped archaeologists place the sculptures in their historical context.

The heads quickly became symbols. A Nigerian postage stamp of 1953 bears the likeness of an Ife head, and the head has been used as an emblem by Nigerian institutions and events. In early 2010 the British Museum showed most of the known copper and brass heads, on loan from Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments, in the exhibition Kingdom of Ife: Sculptures from West Africa.

The Ife heads reached European attention at a time when colonial ideas held that Africans had no history of great art. The sculptures did not fit this belief, and some Europeans tried to explain them away. Frobenius himself admired their beauty but could not accept that Africans had made them. He concocted a theory that Ife preserved the remains of the lost Atlantis, which he placed in Atlantic Africa, and he called the Olokun head “Atlantic Africa’s Poseidon”.

His account combines admiration with racist assumptions. Of the Olokun head he wrote: “Before us stood a head of marvellous beauty, wonderfully cast in antique bronze, true to the life, incrusted with a patina of glorious dark green.” In a separate passage, after finding fragments of a terracotta face, he wrote that they were “eloquent of a symmetry, a vitality, a delicacy of form directly reminiscent of ancient Greece and a proof that, once upon a time, a race, far superior in strain to the negro, had been settled here.” This combination, deep admiration for African objects joined to contempt for African people, was common in colonial collecting.

By 1948 specialists had accepted that the heads were the work of Yoruba artists. They are now understood as an indigenous achievement within a long history of art in what is now Nigeria. The Igbo-Ukwu castings of south-eastern Nigeria, possibly as early as the ninth century (the date is debated), show that lost-wax casting was practised in the region before Ife. A relationship between Ife and the much earlier Nok terracottas of central Nigeria has been suggested but is unproven, and the existence of earlier traditions does not by itself establish a direct line of transmission. The Ife heads are now treated as one of the high points of African art history, not as a mystery that needs an outside explanation.

Ife’s artistic influence continued after the classical age. The court art of Benin, including the famous Benin Bronzes, is linked by tradition to Ife teachers, and, as the Met notes, the naturalistic style of Pavement-era Ife has remained an influence on Yoruba sculpture ever since, with special importance given to the head, the crown and the royal image. In Ife, Obalufon is still honoured as a deified king associated with brass casting and with the crowning of rulers.

Most known heads are now in Nigerian museums, but the colonial-era trade in them created lasting ownership questions. Recent archival research by Tomos Evans traces how the British Museum head was secretly bought and smuggled out of Nigeria, how William Bascom acquired and exported two heads in 1938, which he was pressured to return to Nigeria in 1950 in an unusual early case of repatriation, and evidence that further heads were shipped to Germany in 1938. The terracottas taken by Frobenius are likewise part of wider debates about how African objects entered Western collections. Many Nigerians advocate the return of Ife works held abroad, while museums and Nigerian institutions have also cooperated in exhibitions and research, as in the 2010 Kingdom of Ife exhibition and the scientific study made for it.

Dating Ife sculpture is difficult because many pieces were found by chance, outside controlled excavations, and metal cannot be directly radiocarbon dated. Chronologies rely on associated charcoal, the pavement sequence, thermoluminescence dating of terracottas and of clay casting cores, and stylistic comparison. Specialists generally place the bulk of the naturalistic metal and terracotta works between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries; the Met places the height of Ife’s sculptural tradition in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, within the Pavement period that began around 1000.

Within that span, emphases differ. The Art Fund record dates the British Museum head broadly to the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, and recent archival work describes the Wunmonije heads as fourteenth or fifteenth century. Suzanne Preston Blier, in Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba: Ife History, Power, and Identity, c.1300 (2015), centres much of the corpus around 1300 and reads the art in the light of the politics, risks and dangers of that time. Dates therefore vary by object and by scholarly interpretation; the twelfth to fourteenth centuries describe an artistic peak rather than a firm date for every head.

The stylistic unity of the Wunmonije heads, their shared proportions and details, has led some specialists to propose that they were made by a single artist or a small number of artists within a limited period. If so, the corpus might represent a concentrated royal commission rather than a long, slow tradition. This remains a hypothesis. Lead-isotope evidence that ten of the heads share one stock of metal is a separate finding and does not identify an artist or workshop.

Were the heads portraits of specific individuals? Their variety in facial structure, marks and headgear suggests to some scholars that they depict particular people or offices. Others emphasise their idealisation: most show youthful, serene faces rather than individuals at a given age. The Met also notes that naturalistic and highly stylized heads seem to have coexisted at Ife, perhaps to contrast an outer physical likeness with an inner spiritual essence. A common middle view is that they represent rulers and office-holders in an idealised form, fusing likeness with the ideals of calm, dignity and balance valued in Yoruba aesthetics.

Their use is also debated. The holes around the hairline and jaw and the openings in the necks have long suggested that they were attached to other materials. One influential hypothesis, associated with the archaeologist Frank Willett, is that they were mounted on wooden bodies and dressed as effigies for royal funerary or commemorative rites; the Art Fund’s record of the British Museum head likewise suggests that it was probably made for funerary ceremonies, perhaps attached to a wooden figure. Blier connects the Obalufon mask and related works with coronation and succession rituals. Other interpretations connect them with shrines of royal ancestors or with rituals of installation and renewal of kingship. Surviving Yoruba practices provide suggestive parallels, but no written record from the period confirms any single use.

The history of the Olokun head shows the problems of authenticity that surround such famous objects. After Frobenius was made to give it up in 1910, it was kept by the priest of the Olokun grove until 1934, when the Ooni took it into the palace. In 1949 William Fagg and Leon Underwood published it as a recent sand-cast copy of the original. When it was examined in detail at the British Museum in 2010, the study found that it is a hollow lost-wax casting, very similar in technique and composition to the other heads, and, drawing on lead-isotope analyses carried out in the 1990s and published in 2006, that its metal matches a group of Wunmonije heads; the authors concluded that the balance of evidence suggests it is the head unearthed in 1910. One puzzling thermoluminescence result, suggesting the clay core was heated within the last two centuries, remains to be explained. The episode shows how colonial-era handling, scientific analysis and expert opinion all shape what counts as ‘the’ Ife canon.

The metal of the Ife heads raises questions about trade. Ife lies in the forest zone without major known copper sources in its immediate area, and early writers assumed the metal was imported, for example across the Sahara. Elemental analyses since the 1940s show that most heads are of leaded brass, and lead-isotope studies published by Frank Willett and Edward Sayre in 2006 showed that ten of the Wunmonije heads and the Olokun head were made from the same stock of metal. Where that metal ultimately came from is still not settled.

Ife’s glass industry provides clearer evidence of its economic strength. Glass of a high-lime, high-alumina composition was made at Igbo Olokun mainly between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, apparently largely independently of glass traditions documented elsewhere. Ogundiran argues that Ife used its technological and economic advantages to restructure divine kingship, to standardise the Yoruba religious system and to bring territories as far as the Niger River and the Atlantic coast under its political control or cultural influence.

Ogundiran links the end of Ife’s classical period to several factors: long droughts that began around 1380 across West and East Africa, political disturbances in the western Sudan such as the collapse of the Mali Empire, and internal crisis within the Ife state. The region began to recover only in the late sixteenth century, by which time formerly minor kingdoms such as Oyo had risen, while Ife retained its religious prestige. The heads thus mark a specific historical moment of wealth, royal ambition and artistic experiment.