10 TH E IDOL IN THE AGE OF ART

quite dramatic. While Nah ua manuscript painters themselves participated

in projects of translation by which their language was made legible to
Europeans, in other cases non-European objects transported to Europe
found functions that could not have been anticipated by original makers.
As Suzanne Bliers chapter shows, Europeans who brought African objects
home first imagined ritual contexts that had never existed, and some feared
potential demonic contagion; later, at least one Sapi salt cellar found a role
as the site for a form of secular, European idolatry.
Based in concrete case studies of specific images and practices, these
essays open out onto broader issues of cultural conflict and exchange, the
complexity of religious behavior and belief, and the functions, forms, and
materiality of images. The early modern period was far from uniformly
and resolutely globalized, in the sense in which that term is used now, but
one might characterize it as transcultural, in light of the many instances
here in which meaning and aesthetic practices are defined through cross-
cultural contact. Taken together these chapters read European and non-
European instances of idols and idolatry against one another, presenting
a broader view of the visual culture of the early modern period. They
argue for the crucial role of th idol in positing what counted as art in the
historical moment most central to the definition of the European concept.
 CHAPTER ONE

Capricious Arts: Idols in

Renaissance-era Africa and Europe
(The Case of Sapi and Kongo)
Suzanne Preston Blier

Le fond nest quun lieu common charg de declamations et mLme dides

fausses.
La Harpe, in homage of poet Jean-Baptiste Rousseau

Idols or fetishes as all African wooden figures were scornfully named,

whatever their real function, were systematically burnt by missionaries or by
order of the African kings urged on by them.
Ezio Bassanf, African A rt and Artefacts in European Collections, 1400-1800

It is a given that an artists or patron s original intent often offers far

less insight into an art works larger meaning than does the way that
object came to be understood over the course of its long post-creation
history, with layers of signification accruing like a patin a1 - each new
layer adding to the objects power and value in both real and symbolic
terms. Ritual specialists, collectors, museums, and scholars all play a part
in this artistic enrichment and reshaping. In some contexts, art works
are reinvented through the very process of their reconceptualization and
recycling. A particularly notable example of such reinvention is an early
sixteenth-century West African ivory salt cellar base th at was converted
into a reliquary to store and display bits of the skull of poet Jean Baptiste
Rousseau (1671-1741). The ivory vessel in question (Figure 1.1) is one of
a group of remarkable salt cellars carved by Sapi artists from the coastal
region of current Sierra Leone, probably for a Portuguese patron.

1 See Suzanne Preston Blier 2004, Ways of Experiencing African Art: The Role of
Patina, in A rt o f the Senses: Masterpieces from the W illiam an d Bertha Teel Collection, S.
Blier, ed., Boston, 2004.
12 THE IDOL IN TH E AGE OF ART

Figure 1.1 Cup with the relics of Rousseau. Courtesy of Princes

Czartoryski Foundation at the Nation al Museum in Cracow
In this works new role as a reliquary for the bones of one of the most
acclaimed authors of the eighteenth century, the containers base was
turned up-side-down, its middle was emblazoned in large letters with the
authors last name, and a piece of glass was secured to the height to protect
the iconically charged skeletal fragments from loss or harm. I use both
the terms reliquary (rather than ossuary) and iconic (rather than material)
here purposefully because of the formers associations with veneration
 CAPRICIOUS ARTS 13
and the latters connection to worship. Rousseau was a venerated author,
an icon and idol who was worshiped in his era and in the years after
his death. Parts of his bodily remains were secured in this unusual vessel
base in a manner consistent with a reliquary (cranial bones in keeping
perhaps with the mental primacy of this author). Indeed it is principally
as a result of its reliquary and iconic status that this vessel and its notable
contents came to the attention of the Czartoryski family, who founded the
museum where it is housed today. Like the popular eighteenth-century
poet Rousseau, this Renaissance-era African ivory salt cellar base today
serves as a frame for addressing not only issues of art reconceptualization,
but also larger questions of idols, icons, and the emotional charge of
art works of various types in the Renaissance and in the early period of
European and African interaction.
Rousseaus reliquary - an exemplar of the thriving cult of relics
featuring the remains of poets and other luminaries in Early Modern
Europe - was acquired for the small Polish museum that opened in Pulawy
in 1809 through the auspices of Princess Isabella Czartoryski, matriarch
of a wealthy local noble family. Here, in a neogothic equivalent of a
Renaissance Curio Cabinet (now known as the Czartoryski Museum and
located in Cracow), the Sapi ivory salt cellar base-cum-reliquary was on
view with other real and cultural relics (Chopins piano and Shakespeares
writing table) as well as key art masterpieces such as Leonardos Portrait
o f a Lady with an Ermine (1490, Figure 1.2), these works having been
acquired by the Isabellas son during a c.1800 buying spree in Italy.
Rousseau, whose relics were encased in the Sapi ivory salt cellar base,
was a French native and the author of several early comedies, among these
Le Capricieux of 1700 (the title of this text, his most widely cited, aptly
alludes to the capriciousness with which art works from Africa often were
perceived in the West). In the same way th at the Czartoryski salt cellar
was turned on its head (in actual terms and in its changing function), the
containers new reliquary use calls our attention to the vagaries of art
use and meaning over time, as well as to various issues that shape our
understanding of artistic form through history. As with the Bakhtinian
carnivalesque, the Czartoryski salt cellar, by its very inversion, points up
the role such reframed arts sometimes play in conveying core art historical
issues of place, time, intersection, and signification. Th at a secular serving
form (a salt cellar) was transformed into a reliquary to house the remains
of a popular modern idol suggests as well how fundamentally capricious
the role of art can be.
This chapter examines Early Modern perceptions of African art as idols,
icons, exotica, and curios, focusing on works that began reaching Europe in
14 THE IDOL IN TH E AGE OF ART

Figure 1.2 Leonardo da Vinci, Lady w ith an Erm ine. Courtesy of

Princes Czartoryski Foundation at the Nation al Museum in
Cracow.
 CAPRICIOUS ARTS 15
the late fifteenth to middle sixteenth century.2 My central argument is that
Europeans in this period evinced such disdain and fear of idols with respect
to the harm such forms purportedly could do, th at they ascribed related
values to African religious and secular works that had no such functions,
destroying or quarantining them to preserve the safety of unsuspecting
viewers. In short, Europeans accorded these works far greater and notably
different powers than these works generally held in their homelands.
Similarly capricious responses came to be associated with a group
of African ivory salt cellars commissioned for European nobles in the
Renaissance era, among them the vessel base that found its way to
the Czartoyrski collection, a work whose imagery and form reflects a
combination of African and European sources. In the years after they
were commissioned as table service objects, these ivories became prized
exotica, displayed alongside foreign novelties and natural wonders in
period curio cabinets. The various African art exemplars I discuss suggest
the both curious and capricious ways th at African works were recast in the
European imaginary, qualities th at are particularly marked in the re-use
(recycling) of the Czartoryski salt cellar base into a receptacle for key relics
(skull bones) of Europes early-eighteenth-century poet-idol.
While it is not clear why or how the Czartoryski ivory salt cellar came
to be transformed into a reliquary (and a subject of popular idolatry), the
fact that a salt cellar originating in Africa was chosen for this function is
consistent with the exotic references Sapi elite table arts came to assume
in the years after they first appeared in Europe. Like the broader use of
salt cellars in Europe to mark status and place (those diners seated above
the salt being elevated and thus distinguished from those below it),3
these works came to be vital indices of status and difference. Like salt, the
precious import commodity served up in the handsome vessels, such forms
were linked to the enhancement of taste and the preservation of value in
ways at once metaphoric and real. Commissioned from artists working in
an area the Portuguese would call the islands of idols (Ilhas dos Idolos),
many Sapi salt cellars found early prominence in European curio cabinet
displays, along with other types of natural or artificial exotica. The
changing identity of the Sapi salt cellars in Europe - from table service to
valued curios and in one case a reliquary - suggests the complex ways in

2 Man y of the examples cited, along with their collection histories among these the one
discussed at the outset of this essay, are documented in Katherine Curnows excellent 1983
Ph.D. dissertation, The Afro-Portuguese Ivories: Classification and Stylistic Analysis of a
Hybrid Art Form, PhD. diss., Indiana University, 1983; E. Bassani and W. B. Fagg, Africa
an d The Renaissance: A rt in Ivory, ed. S. Vogel, New York, 1988; and Bassani, African Art
an d Artifacts in European Collections: 1400-1800, ed. M. McLeod, London, 2000.
3 See Blier, Imaging otherness in ivory: African portrayals of the Portuguese ca. 1492,
A rt Bulletin 75/3 (1993), 375-96.
16 TH E IDOL IN TH E AGE OF ART

which Africa (and its arts) were being reshaped in the European imaginary
during the early centuries after contact.
While the term idol historically has been employed in the West to
indicate an image of god or instrument of worship, its important ancillary
associations with improper belief and religious practices both informed
and impacted Western conceptions of related works. The etymological
antecedent of the word idol in the Greek eidolon links the idea of the
idol to that of the specter, apparition, and/or phantom - a connotation
that seems to extend to later associations of the word with the almost pop
star specter of literary, musical, and other living idols, such that bones,
writing chairs, or other relics reflective of their genius would be sought for
museum display. African visual forms of the Renaissance and later eras, in
their very labeling as idols by travelers, missionaries and collectors, were
often invested by their European viewers with complementary attributes of
untoward devotion and irrational belief - regardless of the works original
secular or religious functions.
Before we turn our discussion to the European fascination with African
art that began in the early fifteenth century, it is important to note that
in some ways the central tenets and practices of idol worship are a
more prominent religious feature of European belief practices than of
practices in sub-Saharan Africa. In the West, as noted above, the term idol
generally has been used to refer to an image or form of a God and/or spirit
personification that becomes a primary object and instrument of worship.
In most indigenous African belief systems, by contrast, artworks and/or
other shrine forms, for the most part, are not seen to represent Gods but
rather figurations of emissaries or intermediaries, which help to access
higher powers. Traditional African religious sculptures for this reason tend
to be forms in which a deity or important ancestor may take occasional
shelter (particularly if they have been called here for special worship) but
generally such artworks are not seen to constitute a spirit or deity power
in its own right.4
African religious sculptures in this sense are little different from Catholic
depictions of saints, which are thought of a intermediaries (intercessors)
to God (rather than God itself), visual referents which help the believer
to gain access to this higher power while also both channeling divine
power to a particular place on earth and transmuting acts of devotion
done before them heavenward. And, in the same way that Catholic

4 Historically in Africa there also has been a notable complexity of belief in terms of
traditional religious practice which has long disavowed exclusivity as an essential religious
value to be promoted. Indeed despite the example cited here of idol burning in the Kongo,
local inhabitants readily adopted Christian and Islamic beliefs (and instruments of religious
practice) without dismissing other local traditions important to their family or community
identity.
 CAPRICIOUS ARTS 17
worshipers light candies in the course of devotional practice, so too do
African worshipers and ritual specialists notably interact with related
religious art objects, placing offerings or enriching materials at their base,
and sometimes on the object itself. Th at said, it also should be noted that
in many cases, the primary materials from which African art works are
made are thought to be imbued with inner spiritual power the tree from
which wood is carved, for example, having a spirit primacy that must be
addressed before cutting. The same is also generally true of the iron from
which metal works are forged. Artistic process for this reason often has
important ceremonial dimensions. Unlike what one finds in comparable
Native American contexts, however, no rituals generally are required when
African art works are abandoned or sold; the mere fact that the activating
prayers and offerings are no longer being presented means that the work
has lost whatever ritual primacy it once held.
No doubt there are many reasons why Europeans took Africa to be a
hotbed of dangerous idols and idolatry. One lies in European slavery and
missionary activities in Africa (the two often being closely co-joined) in
the period after contact. Indeed, as early as 1512, the Portuguese king
requested that in order to support missionary efforts and navigation costs,
ships returning from Africa were to be [as] heavily laden as possible with
slaves ...5 By negating African religious practices (and other cultural and
political forms), the pejorative characterizations of these works as objects
of idolatry served in vital ways to both demonize and dehumanize local
populations, thereby providing a moral buttress for European religious
and human trade practices on the continent. An equally important
factor in the linking of Africa with idols may have been the primacy of
anthropomorphic representations within the larger African artistic corpus.
These works, by the very nature of their figural primacy, seem to have been
conjoined with idol worship and idolatry in European thought, not only
as grounded in Old Testament condemnations of false gods, but also as
shaped by the rich art historical landscape of Rome and other European
Christian centers, with their surfeit of Classical figural sculptures linked to
idolatry and pagan worship.

Idol Destruction in Kongo and Rome: The Danger of African Art

With respect to the purported worship of idols, two African art centers were
particularly important in the first centuries of European exploration and
missionary engagement: the coastal areas inhabited by Sapi communities
in the southern area of modern Sierra Leone and the Kongo kingdom in
what is today principally Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

De Pina in Bassani and Fagg 1988, 147.

18 THF. IDOL IN THE AGE OF ART

The almost fetishistic interest that early Portuguese travelers and religious
leaders displayed towards African idols and idol worship goes back to
the earliest years of contact here - explorations that preceded Columbus
voyage to the Americas by some forty years. Alvise da Ca da Mosto, in
his 1460 report of the visit of the Portuguese captain Pero da Sintra to
the islands of the Sapi, accordingly condemns the residents of this region
for being idolatrous and worshiping wooden statues in human form.6
The naming of this larger region as Islands of Idols (Ilhas dos Idolos) is in
keeping with this.7
In 1514, a missive to the King of Portugal from the Kongo monarch
Affonso I, who had recently converted to Christianity, reports on how
local art objects were viewed with respect to missionizing activities. The
letter states that this sovereign had publicly burnt all the idols as local
worshipers watched in shock. Retold in Filippo Pigafettas 1591 Relatione
del Ream e di Con go* this dramatic conflagration reflected not only a key
local event but also the vivid imagination of its later Western raconteur.
Indeed, Pigafetta reported that among the various Kongo idols burned on
this occasion were not only figures of wood and stone, but also winged
dragons, monstrous birds, snakes, goats, and tigers. Th at the latter forms
lie outside the known Kongo canon of arts in historic and modern eras
suggests that these forms were creations largely of a Western rather than
African mind.
The Latin version of Pigafettas account, which appeared in print in
Frankfurt in 1598, is accompanied by a striking engraving (Figure 1.3) by
Theodor and Jean de Bry illustrating this dramatic idol burning incident.
Like the Pigafetta narrative itself, this engraving is shaped in vital ways by
local European beliefs about African religion. In the years that followed,
the engraving no doubt also helped to promote largely pejorative Western
attitudes about Africa, its ritual practices, and its arts. The Kongo setting
which the de Bry brothers depict comprises a small town square framed by
shed-forms and loaf-shaped buildings, one of the former being open at the
front to reveal an anguished worshiper on his knees with arms thrust wide,
as he appeals for help from a huge winged beast-like devil personification
teetering on the tall platform altar in front of him, visible to the viewer
through an immense side window. In the left foreground of the engraving
stands the Kongo king Affonso I, dressed in a European-style crown with
an animal pelt draped over his right shoulder. The scene unfolding in front

6 G. R. Crone, ed. and trans., The Voyages o f Cadam osto, London, 1937, 81 in Bassani
2000, 225.
7 D. Pacheco Pereira, Esm eraldo de Situ Orbis (1506-1508), ed. R. Mauny,
Publicacoes do Centro de Estudos da Guine Portuguesa 19 (1956), 77. See also W.A. Hart,
A Reconsideration of the rediscovered Afro-Portuguese H orn , A frican A rts XXVII/1,
92-3.
In Bassani 2000, xxxv.
 CAPRICIOUS ARTS 19

Figure 1.3 The burning of idols in Congo. Engraving by T. and J. de

Bry, in the Relazione del Ream e di Congo by F. Pigafetta,
Frankfurt, 1598. Photo courtesy of the Edward E. Ayer
Collection, Th e Newberry Library, Chicago.

of the monarch shows various local Kongo aides in textile wrappers rolled
at the waist, carrying squirming anthropomorphosized devil-form idols
- some with claw feet - toward a pyre on which other equally monstrous
(and very lively) beings have been secured. Another local Kongo royal aide
prepares to light the nefarious group. Watching the scene from a position
opposite Affonso I is a Portuguese official in a wide cap and tightly buttoned
waist coat. His left fist is on his hip, a stance suggesting superiority if not
disdain. The outstretched right arm of this European draws our attention
to a heavy dark malevolent-looking devil being carried on the shoulders of
a Kongolese man toward the mass of demonic figures awaiting burning.
The Portuguese observer and the Kongo ruler positioned on either side
mirror each other, their akimbo postures and gestures suggesting that they
are at once complements and adversaries, reinforcing the complex ways in
which these two worlds shaped each other in the early years of contact.
The background structures and figures and the landscape at the periphery
are largely subsumed in shade, this area both framing and directing our
attention toward the central, empty halo-like ring that encircles the demons,
20 THE IDOL IN TH E AGE O F ART

evoking the cleansing nature of fire and the role light and illumination
have long held as Christian signifiers of revelation.
The fabulous bestiary of monstrous forms within this circle - a dragon,
a winged crocodile, a human pangolin-like form, and a spiral horned goat,
among others - struggle to free themselves from the combustible pile. The
position of the Portuguese leader with respect to this devilish grouping
is noteworthy. Simultaneously adjacent to and standing just above this
energized mass, the Christian emissary is precariously close to going up
in smoke with them. At first glance, indeed, it looks as if the Portuguese
missionary is standing directly on top of the mound of idols about to be
set afire. Whatever the artists compositional aims in the placement of this
European figure, it seems clear that an important sub-text of the work is
the sizable risk posed to those engaged in the evangelizing efforts, due to
the malevolent nature of pagan idols and those responsible for them.
The above example of African idol destruction is not an isolated case.
European missionaries to Africa, the Americas, and other parts of the
world make frequent references at once to dangerous icons and to the
sizable efforts undertaken to destroy them by fire and other means. A
particularly notable related document is preserved in the Archives of the
Propaganda Fide in Rome. This document, the travel journal of Father
Andrea da Pavia, a Superior in Angola from 1688 to 1691, explains that,
in addition to destroying an array of idols from one of the Kongo-related
sub-groups (the Sogno or Solongo), this missionary also had brought a
large trunk of local religious artifacts from central Africa back with him to
Italy, with hopes of displaying them to the Italian public. What is striking
in his account is the impact such idols had on religious leaders in Rome at
this time. According to Father da Pavia:
As soon as I arrived [in Rome from Angola in 1692] I visited the Secretary of
Propaganda Fide Monsignor [Cybo], [...]. The first thing he wanted to have
full information about [was] a trunk of idols and other various instruments of
superstitious practices brought with me from Africa and taken by force from
the people of Sogno, that I sent to him from [Genoa]; so, one morning he sent
for me and wanted me to arrange all those idols and instruments on a table and
to give information about each of them, so th at he could do the same with the
Cardinals of Propaganda. I gave the information in voice and in writing, and
he was so satisfied since no one had brought similar things; once these idols
were known, everyone wanted to see them [...] but I w as no more allowed to
see or handle them [...] or rather I was worried that I would not be able to take
them to Milan for a gallery, as I was exorted to do, and indeed I missed them.
Monsignore commended us for bringing these devilish things, while no one else
had done a similar thing.9

9 In the Rapporto dAndrea da Pavia ai Cardinali della Propaganda al suo ritono dal
Congo, Archives of Propaganda Fide, Ms. SOCG T.514, 470 and 471. Cited in Bassani
2000, 161. Bassani notes in turn (2000, 160-1) that: It seems obvious that the missionaries
would have brought to Europe large quantities of African works of art and artefacts in
 CAPRICIOUS ARTS 21
As indicated here, the works Father da Pavia transported back to Italy
had been quickly confiscated and secreted away by the Propaganda Fides
powerful Secretary, Cardinal Cybo, before the priest or public could be
harmed further by them. Labeled as idols, instruments of superstitious
practice, and devilish things, there can be little doubt that these African
religious works were considered a threat not just to native Kongo
worshipers but also and equally importantly to unsuspecting Europeans.101
Significantly, in Kongo and in most other religious contexts, it would be
unthinkable that an individual would be able to disempower a potent
African god by destroying a particular figure or shrine associated with it,
as Christian missionaries attempted to do in conjunction with early and
later missionary campaigns such as those discussed here. If nothing else,
this suggests how differently African religious art works were framed in
these two areas.

Sapi Ivories: From Salt Cellars to Curio Cabinet Exotica

Like early Kongo religious and other arts, the ivory containers commissioned
from Sapi artists to serve as salt cellars for elite dining tables also came to
figure prominently in the European imaginary as exotica, even if many of
their early collectors had little if any knowledge that these works were African
in origin. One such Sapi salt cellar was part of the collection of Albrecht
Drer (1471-1528), the famed Nremberg artist. Drers journal account
of his 1520-21 meeting with Holy Roman Emperor Charles V indicates
that, in addition to conveying to this monarch drawings, engravings, and
paintings to help cover travel expenses, the artist also sold him ... an
entire museum of rarities, [such] as exotic weapons, buffalo horns, Indian
saltcellars, skulls carved in ivory ...M1 The salt cellars in question, which,
Bassani suggests, were most likely purchased by Drer during an earlier
trip to Antwerp (a thriving port city that had in 1519 become part of Spain
when Charles V became Holy Roman Emperor), were thought by Drer
to have come from Calcutta, though as Bassani explains, more likely they
were of Sapi origin. While the current whereabouts of these two salt cellars
are unknown, what is of vital interest here is how these paradigmatically
secular arts by this time already were being refashioned as exotic rarities,
along with weapons, buffalo horns, and ivory skulls.

the first centuries of evangelization. [Yet] ... only two figures [of wood] ... brought to the
Congregazione di Propaganda Fide of Rome by the Capucin Father Andrea da Pavia in 1692
[today serve] as evidence of the superstitious practices of the African peoples.
10 Interestingly, according to Bassani (2000, xxxv): Notwithstanding extensive
searching, I have not been able to find those sculptures which were confiscated by Cardinal
Cybo in the above described incident.
11 J. Veth and S. Muller, Albrecht Drers niederlndische Reise, Berlin, 1918; E.
Panofsky, Albrecht Drer, Princeton, 1943 in Bassani 2000, 114..
22 THE IDOL IN TH E AGE OF ART

To Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, in turn, this

collection of exotica from the cosas de las Yn dias and elsewhere was so
important that when he abdicated power in 1555 and entered a monastery
(Yuste in Estremadura) he took these works with him. A later certificate
authenticates that a sort of ivory cup, thought to have been a present
of an Egyptian Pash a, was among the objects that accompanied Charles
V to his monastery retreat.12 As with the salt cellar discussed earlier in
this chapter, Charles Vs Sapi salt cellar, a work which, conceivably, Diirer
also had owned, was important as an exotic curio, not an imported table
service object.
Sapi salt cellars also entered into important Italian collections as exotica
early on, among these the Cospi collection, a corpus of objects presented to
the Bologna Palazzo Pubblico in 1675 and known through two catalogues
(1667 and 1677), as well as an engraving by Legati, which accompanied
the latter catalogue.13 Legatis engraving of this curio museum (Figure 1.4)
provides a cutaway view of its shelves, filled with various natural and
artificial curiosities. In Legatis illustration of the interior of this building,
several works appear to show the characteristic egg shape of Sapi ivory salt
cellars. Among these is a vessel in the uppermost row of the left bank of
shelves, next to what appears to be an elephant tusk. Another somewhat
similar vessel appears two shelves to the right, and a third may be seen on
the shelf at the far right, in this case, on the third tier from the bottom.
The Cospi salt cellar (Figure 1.5) now in the Museo Civico, which may
have been illustrated in this museum engraving, is a striking sculpture.
Like other vessels of this type, an egg shaped container demarks the vessels
mid-section, the top half or cover in this case showing an unusual scene
of a man lying horizontally and face up on a quadruped. (The adjacent
figure is broken.) The bottom part of the salt cellar in turn incorporates
an animated scene of downwardly undulating serpents, their mouths wide
open as they confront several upwardly facing snarling dogs with fangs
prominent and hackles raised as they counter the hissing snakes. Standing
between the dogs is a series of figures, which, to judge from their long,
flowing coiffures, appear to depict Portuguese sailors.
Scholars disagree on the meaning of key iconographic elements in this
and other Sapi salt cellars. Drawing in part on the cluster of European
motifs found in related Sapi ivory horn traditions, Bassani has tended to
see these salt cellars as largely based on European imagery.14 In the case of
the Cospi salt cellar illustrated here, he identifies15 the central cover motif

12 J. M. Morn and E Checa, El Coleccionismo en Espa a: De la cm ara de m aravillas

a la galera de pinturas, Madrid, 1985 in Bassani 2000, 190.
13 Bassani 2000, 137.
14 Bassani and Fagg 1988, no. 8.
15 Bassani 2000, xxiii
 CAPRICIOUS ARTS 23

Figure 1.4 Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, view of the collection of Ferdinando

Cospi, in Lorenzo Legati, M useo cospiano annesso a quello
del fam oso Ulisse A ldrovandi e don ato alia su a Patn a
(Bologna: Giacomo Monti, 1677).

specifically as a ... witch on a goat ... derived from a European model

... In an article addressing the larger corpus of African ivories from the
period c.1492,1 have suggested, to the contrary, that many of these ivories,
despite their occasional integration of European visual references, draw in
important ways on local African artistic ideas and perceptions both about
the world and about the place of Europeans within it. In the case of the
Sapi salt cellar showing a man riding a quadruped, it should be noted that
this figure not only wears an African style headdress, but also displays
physiognomic features characteristic of local individuals, suggesting that
rather than evoking a European witch, the artist instead portrayed an
individual of Sapi origin. Moreover, the figures position at the back of the
quadruped is in keeping with early Sapi stone carvings created for local
patrons, even if such figures generally are seen astride the animals rather
than lying supin e.16
In this salt cellar, as in others, serpents are prominent, these forms often
depicted slithering down from the height or central pedestal toward the
base. Serpentine imagery in the coastal area of Sierra Leone and Guinea once
inhabited by the Sapi is said in the modern era to involve personifications of

16 See F. Lamp, House of Stones: Memorial Art of Fifteenth Century Sierra Leone, Art
Bulletin, 65/2 (1983), 219-37.
 TH E IDOL IN TH E AGE OF ART
24

HHHHN

'^Urc 1.5 Sapi (Sierra Leone) Salt cellar. Ivory, c.1501-50?, h. 24 cm.
Bologna, Museo Civico Medioevale, inv. SN. Acquired in
1878 from the Collezioni Universitaire. Inventario 1680, 29.
Bassani 2000: Plate 462.
 CAPRICIOUS ARTS 25
local water spirits known as Ninkinanka and Nin iganne. These serpent-
form supernaturals, believed to descend in part from female pythons,
provide their human caretakers with riches and other forms of well-being,
while also posing certain risks, including potentially death. Although the
significance of the interaction of these serpent forms with dogs is not known,
a strong animosity is said to mark the relationships between Niniganne
water spirits and the latter animals. One of the possible meanings of
their antipathy is the opposition (confrontation) of physical and spiritual
worlds - of ontological concerns an d questions of belief - these issues also
having important correlates with both the conceptualization of idols and
the vacillating roles of these works in European contexts of signification.
One of the most notable features of this and other Sapi salt cellars is
the egg-shaped form of the container itself. This vessel form, while also
featured in European salt cellar prototypes, seems to hold special meaning
in local religious traditions. Thus, among the nearby Mende, the earth
is identified as a primeval egg from which all life derives.17 The Sapi salt
cellars in this way convey vital attributes of both an im ago mundi and
wellspring of life, the striking oval shape of the work also recalling the
python egg surround from which the sometimes dangerous wealth-giving
Niniganne water spirits are said to periodically hatch.18
Like the Cospi collection, the Museum of the Jesuits in Rome, known
more generally as the Museo Kircheriano, also housed a notable salt cellar
of Sapi origin (Figure 1.6). In this case too, an early engraving affords
us a view of this once famous curio museum, in this case a 1678 work
published in the Rom ani Collegii Societatis Jesu Musaeum celeberrimum
..., by Athanasius Kircher.19 Established by a Siennese Cardinal named
Flavio Chigi (1641-93) in the garden of his Roman palace, this collection
was notable for its eclectic mix of exotica and art from various parts of the
world, many of which were acquired specifically for this display by Kircher,
the Jesuit Museums founder and first director.20 A 1716 exhibition report

17 W. Harris and H. Sawyer, The Springs o f Mende Belief an d Conduct, Freetown,

1986, in Blier 1993, 395.
18 Th at the Cospi salt cellar, and several of the other early Sapi ivory salt cellars, were
seen as foreign exotica from India, Egypt or China suggests that even in the early years after
these works entered into European collections, the unusualness of the shape and iconography
set them apart from other works distinctively European. It is noteworthy too, that among
the foreign (European) elements which were integrated into Sapi ivory horns, as with the
Sapi salt cellars created for European patrons, were winged dragons, centaur-like human
headed quadrupeds, and monstrous birds with intertwined necks, suggesting not only the
importance of elements from classical mythology in Renaissance-era commissioned arts from
Africa, but also the roles such pagan themes may have had in referencing foreign beliefs, as
evidenced in among other things, the de Bry engraving of Kongo idol burning where dragons
and monstrous anthropomorphs also figured prominently.
19 Cited and illustrated in Bassani 2000, p. xxvi, fig. 16.
20 Bassani 2000, xxvi.
26 TH E IDOL IN TH E AGE OF ART

Figure 1.6 Sapi (Sierra Leone) salt cellar. Ivory, c. 1501-50? Museo
Pigorini, Rome.
 CAPRICIOUS ARTS 27
identifies, among the museums various items, delicate works in ivory
perhaps referring to Sapi works; the 1876 catalogue of the Museo
Kircheriano lists an Ivory box of spherical shape, at the base Chinese
figures and crosses among them carved in relief, on the top of a double
human h ead.21 Noteworthy with respect to this work, now in the Museo
Preistorico Etnografico (the Pigorini Museum), is not only the indication
of the carvings foreign elements (here identified as Chinese) and the
unusual janiform heads that surmount the cover, but also the description
of another carved ivory in this collection as ex Africa allatum, this being
the first occasion on which the African origin of one of these ivories is
noted in print.22 The janiform h eads at the height of the vessel, which is an
important local motif - suggesting perhaps, past and present, and/or the
primacy of both spiritual and physical worlds - are also relevant to this
discussion because they seem to call up the various ways that viewers from
different cultures or eras often see the same works.
By far the most unusual example of a Sapi salt cellar as exotic curio is
the work described at the outset of this chapter (Figure 1.1), which was
purchased c. 1800 for the small Polish museum Princess Isabella Czartoryski
h ad founded in Pulawy, intending to convey the history of this region
in to the broader world. This and many other works purchased for the
collection were acquired by Isabellas son, Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski
(1770-1861), while he was serving as ambassador to the Sardinian King
in Rome. The objects on display included such mementoes as the above
cited Chopin piano and Shakespeare chair, a bust of the Russian-Polish
Emperor Alexander I (Jerzys close acquaintance and sometime patron),
Turkish tents and Polish militaria recovered following King Jan Sobieskis
defeat of the Ottoman army in Vienna in 1683, Egyptian mummies, parts
of famous Roman buildings (some excavated personally by Jerzy), early
Christian funerary arts, the relics of famous period poets (not only those of
Jean Baptiste Rousseau but also those of Petrarch), and several old master
paintings, Leonardos Lady with an Erm ine (Figure 1.3) among them.
Leonardos 1490 Lady with an Erm ine, acquired by Czartoryski for
this museum,23 had been painted by the artist while he was working for
the Milan Duke, Ludovico Sforza. While this striking portrait seems at
first glance to have little if anything in common with the Sapi salt cellar
reliquary, which also was acquired for the new Czartoryski museum, both
works bring to the forefront the striking roles beliefs about idols play in

21 Bassani 2000, 160-1.

22 Bassani 2000, xxx.
23 Also included were Rembrandts The Good Sam aritan, Raphaels Portrait o f a
Y oung Man (now missing). The various works in the collection, which following the Russian
occupation of 1830-31 were moved to Paris, were returned to Poland and are now exhibited
in Cracow in the newly established Czartoryski Museum.
28 TH E IDOL IN TH E AGE OF ART

art, religion, and life. The sitter, Cecilia Gallerani, a lady-in-waiting in the
Milan court and herself a famed author, had become the Dukes mistress
in 1489, the ermine not only signifying high value (via its prized pelt),
but also through a pun, the sitter Cecilia herself, the Greek word for this
animal, galee, being a play on her own family name. At the same time,
this animal refers to the Duke, her lover, for in 1488 he had received the
insignia of the chivalric Order of Ermine from Naples king. The paintings
unusual ermine subject thus evokes the identities of both members of this
union. In this paintings bold celebration of the power of romantic love, it
calls attention at once to the idolizing passions that fuel romance, and the
idol-like qualities famous art works come to assume.
The Czartoryski Sapi salt cellar is both a notable (exemplary) and
unusual (exceptional) inclusion in this neogothic curio museum. The
work is described in the collections 1820-30 catalogue as The corpse
of Jean Baptiste Rousseau put in the ivory case, covered with glass.24 In
short, Rousseau as relic (icon, idol) is the primary subject on view, not
the c.1500-50 Sapi ivory salt cellar base, which served as the container
and most visible referent to the French literary figure whose relics it
housed. The catalogue entry goes on to discuss the accomplishments of
Rousseau, devoting only one sentence to the unusual ivory enclosure.
Rousseaus prominence specifically in Vienna circles no doubt made his
relics particularly important to this regional history museum.
Rousseau wrote several early comedies, among these Le Capricieux, as
well as the opera Venus et A donis - neither having much popular success in
his native France. Eater Rousseau also published four books of odes (one
adapted from the Psalms - see below), two books of allegories, and various
cantatas and epigrams, the latter being considered among the authors best
creations. Rousseau was equally well known for his biting lampoons of
contemporaries and for the array of libelous and obscene verses attributed
to him beginning early in his career. The private circulation of the latter
verses to members of the Academie Franaise was a critical factor in
blocking his candidacy into that august group. When seeking to allay the
damage, Rousseau attributed the offensive works to a competitor, Joseph
Saunin; he was subsequently brought to court for character defamation,
and in 1712, following his failure to appear in court and pay related fines,
he was condemned to exile for life. As a result, Rousseau was forced to
pass most of his productive years abroad, supported by an array of foreign
patrons. Exiled from his home land, a sojourner in other lands, his life
in many ways turned upside down, Rousseaus career paralleled the life
history of the Sapi ivory vessel that would house his relics.

24 Bassani 2000, 117. It is unclear whether Bassanis translation gives a correct sense of
the original, but it is clearly not Rousseaus whole corpse that went into the ivory case. Other
sources indicate that it was only a few bones of Rousseaus cranium.
 CAPRICIOUS ARTS 29
Like the Sapi salt cellar that safeguarded and displayed the literary
icons skull fragments, idols (whether living humans or empowered objects
created by them) historically have been identified at once with popular
belief and with the challenge to accepted mores that such beliefs promote.
In the same way that Rousseau was transformed from a prominent Paris
auth or to an outlaw idol, the corpus of Sapi salt cellars over their life
histories similarly experienced several identity shifts - in this case from
African elephant defenses to European table service, then from curios and
foreign exotica to valued exemplars of African creativity. Artworks and
idols in this respect share identities as avatars of the capricious nature of
both cultural forms and belief, signaling at the same time the enduring
power of each.
This exploration of African art and its reshaping in Europe in the
Renaissance and early modern eras has provided a glimpse into the
complex ways idols are fashioned. With the Kongo art examples, we saw
how an almost fetishistic Western fascination with and fear of idols led
not only to these sculptures being secreted away and/or destroyed but also
to their reimagining (reinvention) by period writers and artists, among
these Pigafetta and the de Bry brothers. With both of the latter, we saw
how these works were made to conform to fantasies of demonic monsters
that had long populated the Western imaginary of idol imagery. With Sapi
salt cellars of the same era, works of this sort, although commissioned by
European patrons, were transformed soon after their arrival in the West
from secular, essentially functional arts to exotic curios and exemplars of
great wonder. If the Renaissance-era Kongolese idols signaled to Western
viewers the ever-present specter of danger and pollution that idols were
seen to hold, the corpus of Sapi salt cellars circulating in Europe in the
same period carried the equally strange imprimatur of exotic trophies
notable largely for the difficulty of their acquisition and the sense of
foreignness they conveyed. Like the turning of the Czartoryski salt cellar
base on its head for its new role as a reliquary, sometimes artworks most
salient meanings are those that accrete to them over the course of their
life histories, even if (especially if) these new attributes turn many of the
works original elements of signification upside down.