Oliphant with the Portuguese Royal Coat of Arms

The first artworks resulting from the initial commercial contacts between the Portuguese and the ethnically diverse West-African populations living between the Upper Guinea Coast and the Kingdoms of Kongo and Angola, are the earliest truly multi-cultural objects that emerge from the Portuguese overseas expansion. As for the carved ivory objects made for the Portuguese clientele, their attraction lay primarily in the raw material, given the time-honoured appreciation for the manufacturing and artistic qualities of elephant ivory, reinforced by its relative rarity in Europe until then. During the Renaissance, it was the quality of the materials and the exquisite craftsmanship that lay at the heart of the European elites’ consumerism, and this is also true for objects made worldwide, which arrived in Europe aboard the Portuguese ships from the late fifteen century onwards.

Over the last few decades there has been considerable academic interest in West African carved ivories, produced under more or less direct Portuguese influence at the dawn of the early modern period. Research by scholars such as William Fagg, Ezio Bassani, Kathy Curnow, Peter Mark, Jean Michel Massing, and Kate Lowe, among others, have provided new and valuable insights on the subject.

The first, and probably the largest and most important ivory carving centre on the West African coast has been identified as present-day Sierra Leone, a fact that is easily understood considering the chronology of the Portuguese coastal exploration and the abundance of elephant ivory. There has also been consensus regarding the attribution of the craftsmen origin to the Temne and Bullom peoples of Sierra Leone, based on contemporary literary and documentary sources, and stylistic comparisons with earlier productions from the same region, namely of small sized stone sculptures known as nomoli. In his work Esmeraldo de situ orbis, written around 1506, Duarte Pacheco Pereira (1460-1533), a Portuguese sea captain, soldier, explorer, and cosmographer, refers that in Sierra Leone, next to the Kolenté river, they make some very pretty palm fibre mats and also ivory spoons, adding that the Bullom make the most subtle, that is, the most delicate and the better made spoons than elsewhere. Writing between 1506 and 1510, based on reports by Álvaro Velho do Barreiro regarding Sierra Leone, the German-born book publisher Valentim Fernandes († ca. 1518-1519), states that the black men of this land are very subtle in manual arts, namely in making ivory salt cellars and spoons, and anything presented to them in drawing they cut it, that is, carve it, in ivory.

Oliphants, or hunting horns - of European-derived imagery and shape - adapted from late fifteenth and early sixteenth-century prints depicting hunting scenes, are amongst the most fascinating objects made in this context in Sierra Leone.[1] The present example, featuring the Portuguese royal coat of arms, is exceptional for its surface wear and tear, a testimony to the effective practical use of such objects, that contrasts with pristine examples surviving in Renaissance princely collections or Kunstkammern.[2]