Spoon

A goat appears at the top of a support held by the jaws of a snake, which has its twisting body fastened to a little fluted column on the back of a cheetah which has captured another animal. This is the com-plex and curious sequence of wild animals that form the handle of the spoon. The work, from the ducal collections, comes from the ancient Kingdom of Benin which was famous for its sculptors who, like the Sapi in Sierra Leone, supplied ornaments and little ivory objects for rich European merchants. The art-ists often worked from drawings and models provided by Europeans, but they reinterpreted them in their local manner.