In present-day Nigeria, the court of the Kingdom of Benin — a powerful state from the thirteenth century onward — was home to one of the most refined traditions of metal casting in world art. The thousands of works known as the "Benin Bronzes" — in fact mostly brass — consist of relief plaques that clad the wooden pillars of the king's (Oba) palace, royal heads, and animal and human figures. Their most splendid period reaches into the sixteenth century.

The masters used the "lost-wax" (cire perdue) technique: a model was first made in beeswax, coated in clay; when heated, the wax ran out and molten metal was poured into the emptied mould. The refinement achieved by this method is astonishing — the texture of braided hair, the layers of coral-bead collars, the calm of the facial expressions, the depth of the reliefs. This was a technical level not inferior to that of Europe's Renaissance casting masters.

The plaques were also an archive of history: they recorded court ceremonies, wars, Portuguese traders, and the power of the rulers — the visual memory of a society without writing. Here art was not ornament but power and history itself.

In 1897 a British military expedition sacked the city of Benin; thousands of works were dispersed to museums in Europe and America. That looting is today at the centre of one of the world's most contested cases of cultural heritage and restitution; the process of returning the works to Nigeria is ongoing. The Benin Bronzes recall a truth that Western art history long ignored: monumental, technically superior, and historically conscious art developed on its own for centuries in sub-Saharan Africa.