Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Power Figure: Standing Male with Raised Arm (Nkisi)
Not on view
While minkisi are referred to in accounts of Kongo society by European clerics from the sixteenth century on, they were not collected by Westerners until the nineteenth century. Until that time Europeans regarded such artifacts as spiritually potent competition to their own religious beliefs. In this example, the torso is a hollowed rectangular receptacle for empowering matter added by a religious specialist to attract a force within. The figurative container was commissioned from a regionally renowned carver whose work was in great demand and whose talents are evident in a variety of sculptural forms.
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