Yoruba (of whom there are over forty million worldwide, most in Nigeria) claim the city of Ife as their place of origin. Ife’s origin story—according to which two sibling deities, Oduduwa (younger) and Obatala (older), produced the land and then the people, as sixteen branching lineages that founded independent city-states—allows Yoruba to rehearse a common identity without ceding political power to a dynasty that is among the oldest in world. Ancient Ife also is the source of some of the most extraordinary art produced in Africa, especially copper alloy masks and heads, but also life-size sculptures in terra cotta and stone carvings of human figures and various animals. This corpus has a peculiar place in the history of African art history. Early in the twentieth century this art was celebrated as among the most technologically sophisticated work of its kind produced anywhere, yet because of its ostensible “naturalism,” not to mention technological skill, Ife art was thought to have been made not by Africans, but by people of European origin. Later, as more of the Ife corpus emerged from archeological digs, it was claimed to be ancestral to Yoruba as a celebratory marker of ethnic creativity. The copper alloy heads in particular have been used as a symbol of Nigeria as a whole, and in some contexts as objectifications of a pan-African identity. Lost in its transubstantiation is this art’s historical specificity.

Suzanne Preston Blier wants to change that historiography by linking Ife’s artistic “florescence” (her word) to a very specific moment in Ife’s history as a city state that thrived on the trade in glass beads, textiles, and iron produced by its inhabitants. In this ambitious and lavishly illustrated monograph, dense and encyclopedic in its cross-referencing of iconography, archeological evidence, ritual practices, and oral history collected via interviews with members of Ife’s current aristocracy, Blier makes a daring attack on the idea of ethnic identity itself. She argues that Ife’s florescence emerged out of a brilliant political move by an early fourteenth-century ruler, Ọbalùfọ̀n II, to bring together, through the rituals of divine rulership, two groups—autocthones and immigrants—after a bloody civil war that turned the city’s streets into a slaughterhouse. All the masks and portrait heads were made in one generation (the fabulous copper alloy heads likely by one artist) and for one purpose—to heal ethnic divisions in Ife, and to transform ethnic antagonism into a kind of cosmological synthesis of competing, yet codependent, deities. Obatala and Oduduwa were not just gods but stand-ins for ethnic groups. Ife, rather than being the birthplace of Yoruba, was a cosmopolitan city. Its art, rather than being ancestral to Yoruba, represented and embodied a creative moment of cosmopolitan synthesis. The synthesis is written in the iconography of the art itself—the way certain portraits always are scarified and matched with portraits that are not, and how those portraits, in turn, are decorated with different embellishments, bestiaries, and crowns.

Blier’s analysis of Ife art as a producer of ethnic synthesis is itself a masterful exemplification of how an art historian can combine sources of information by treating objects as parts of larger assemblages that were meant to work together (and produce meaning together) in ritual performances that instantiate political power. The evidence she amasses is compelling and encompassing. Less compelling is Blier’s decision to incessantly evoke the trope of “risk,” as if her history also addresses a theory of human motivation that joins art and politics. She argues, for example, that Ife kings risked being attacked by sorcerers when they appeared in public, while the crown itself contained protective magic that might also kill them. “The royal crown,” she says, “risk-filled as it is, serves in this context additionally as an artful shield protecting the king’s fontanel and safeguarding this point of vulnerability and risk” (349). She stresses that Ife metallurgists risked their lives by making such ductile copper alloys and died of arsenic poisoning or cancer. She also deems as historically accurate a local narrative claiming that the artists who made the famous masks and heads for Ọbalùfọ̀n II were murdered by his successor because they had made a mask so lifelike that it allowed his kin to rule via impersonation after his death. Art, like politics, is a risky business. But the idea of risk implies the capacity for choice. Those born into artist’s guilds can choose not to practice their craft, but kings cannot chose to opt out of wearing a crown in public ceremonies.

The trope of “risk” sometimes works, but often it seems like an add-on to a masterful analysis that needs no such embellishments. Indeed, few scholars will gainsay that the risk taken by Blier in asserting a specific historical cause for Ife’s artistic florescence resulted in a text that will quickly become the foundational work on Ife art and a model for art history as a multidisciplinary enterprise.