Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Horse and Rider
Bankoni (Bougouni region, Mali; Northern Africa and the Sahel)
12th/15th century
- Medium
- Terracotta
- Classification
- Sculpture
- Dimensions
- 70 × 21 × 48.5 cm (27 1/2 × 8 1/4 × 19 in.)
- Culture
- Mali
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Arts of Africa
- Credit line
- Ada Turnbull Hertle Endowment
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Seated on a bridled horse, this bearded equestrian has an elaborate hairstyle, facial scarifications, and jewelry that reflect wealth and status. The rider’s sheathed knife further indicates the key role that warriors on horseback played in expanding West Africa’s great empires from the 1100s to the early 1600s: Quick-moving cavalry could maintain control over vast territories. Traveling merchants who served these powerful states traded goods and ideas with the Mediterranean world, the Middle East, and Asia. Figures in this style (see 1987.314.1-5) have been unearthed in Bankoni, a village near Mali’s capital, since the 1950s.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
