Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Luxury Cloth
Not on view
This fragment of a dyed raffia cloth may have been part of a cushion cover. It is the only work in the extant corpus of early Kongo textiles that features such extensive use of black pigment. In a 1512 letter, King Afonso I of Kongo (r. 1509–42) mentions sending a royal gift that included fine black raffia cloth to his Portuguese counterpart Manuel I (r. 1495–1521).
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