Kongo Brass Corpus, Angola or Democratic Republic of the Congo

Reportedly from a missionary collection
Marc Leo Felix, Brussels (Reference no. "FC6 1192")
Harold Gray, Washington, D.C., acquired from the above on July 10, 1986

Ross (2000) notes: "In 1491, King Nzinga converted to Christianity of his own free will, urging the Kongo nobility and peasant classes to follow suit. To varying degrees, the Kongo kingdom remained Christian for the next 200 years.  Scholars continue to dispute the authenticity of Kongolese Christian faith and the degree to which the adoption of a new faith was motivated by political and economic realities.  From the time of Nzinga's conversion until the seventeenth century, Kongo leadership engaged in extensive communications with religious and political leaders from Europe, including the pope and other members of the Vatican, who accepted the Kongo church as orthodox."

Three closely related examples, possibly from the same foundry and casts of the same model, are in the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, inv. nos. "55.95.7" and "55.95.12", and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. no. "1999.295.12").