Luxury Cloth: Cushion Cover
Returned to lender
This work of art was on loan to the museum and has since been returned to its lender.Across the Kongo region and along the Loango coast, textiles had utilitarian, economic, and social uses as well as profound cosmological significance as part of a living universe in the continuous process of being created. Raffia fabrics were associated with times of transition and reproduction and used in rituals of birth, initiation, marriage, and burial: the newborn was laid on cloth; young people wore cloth skirts at initiation; a suitor carried gifts of palm wine and cloth to his future mother-in-law; families wrapped their deceased in the best cloth they could afford to prepare them for passage to the world of the ancestors; cloth was used to pay legal fees; and cloth changed hands when chiefs and rulers were installed or concluded alliances.
Artwork Details
- Title: Luxury Cloth: Cushion Cover
- Date: 17th –18th century, inventoried 1737
- Geography: Democratic Republic of the Congo; Republic of the Congo; Angola
- Culture: Kongo peoples; Kongo Kingdom
- Medium: Raffia
- Dimensions: 23 5/8 × 18 1/2 in. (60 × 47 cm)
- Classification: Textiles-Woven
- Credit Line: Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen
- Curatorial Department: The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing