The Ivory Salt Cellar at the Pitt Rivers Museum

Working with one of Factum Foundation London’s trustees, Professor Jerry Brotton, Factum recorded and made a facsimile of a 15th-century Afro-Portuguese ivory salt cellar, one of the most significant and delicate objects in the collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (PRM) so that it can be used to engage with wider publics on African history and ivory trade.

The salt cellar is part of a body of ivory artworks known to art historians as “Afro-Portuguese” carved ivories (cutlery, hunting horns, salt cellars, boxes) that were made by West African Sapi artists in the 15th and 16th centuries for Portuguese merchants as part of gifts and patronage. It is European in form but the motifs and decorative elements combine West African with European cultural symbols. Because of the Portuguese and later European colonial extraction of raw ivory after this period, the salt cellars and carvings represent a specific interaction between artists and European buyers, as these specific pieces were being commissioned, which gives us a glimpse into the life and knowledge systems of the carvers in a way that we can’t access with raw ivory being traded, or with written records of Portuguese observers.

The finished piece is now in Oxford and will be used in PRM study days and family handling events, as well as exhibited in Brotton’s forthcoming exhibition on cultural exchange in Tudor England and beyond at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, to which Factum will contribute other works.