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Preview image of work. wood, copper, brass on wooden base                                                                    ,  Reliquary Figure (Mbulu-Ngulu) 7499
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1969.69.a.&.b

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Reliquary Figure (Mbulu-Ngulu)

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Artists

Artist Unidentified ; Artist Unidentified (Kota)

Title

Reliquary Figure (Mbulu-Ngulu)

Creation Date

ca. 1900

Century

early 20th century

Dimensions

20 3/4 in. x 11 1/8 in. x 1 3/4 in. (52.71 cm x 28.26 cm x 4.45 cm)

Classification

Sculpture

Creation Place

Central Africa, Gabon

Medium and Support

wood, copper, brass on wooden base

Credit Line

Museum Purchase, Florence C. Quinby Fund, in memory of Henry Cole Quinby, Honorary Degree, 1916

Copyright

Public Domain

Accession Number

1969.69.a.&.b

This reliquary figure represents an idealized face demonstrating the power of its owner’s ancestors. Once kept with a box containing bones of these ancestors and used for ancestral veneration, these sculptures are now used to invoke and celebrate precolonial tradition. With colonization and conversion to Christianity in the early to mid-twentieth century, many people in Kota regions sold their reliquary figures to foreign collectors, leaving fewer historical works in these regions. Such changes indicate how various people have transformed the uses of reliquary figures.