Art and science in Benin bronzes

African Arts, Spring, 2004 by Joseph Nevadomsky

Factor in the Geneva and Milan labs that appear stunning in their scientific virtuosity, apparently way ahead of their time. The guys who run these labs are so straight they have to screw their socks on every morning. However, concerns about reliability and validity creep in, and I offer a word to the wise to take their results with a grain of salt. Caution is called for, and clients should temper their narcissistic desires to own a genuine 100% authenticated Benin bronze. Guarantees have created a stir among art historians, because what look like recently made artifacts bear pre-1897 certification. Like everyone else, art historians believe in science but wonder why test results are out of sync with their own stylistic evaluations.

As much as I like science, and believe in evolution, black holes, parallel universes, chaos theory, and the biological impossibility of men and women ever getting to really know each other, at the end of the game the score registers more on the art history than the science side. That is likely to change. For the moment, art history has the upper hand.

The reason is very simple, one that scientists understand and most others do not. Carl Sagan once said that extraordinary claims must be supported by extraordinary evidence. This applies to any scientific endeavor. Art historians express anxiety over absolute dating methods, not just because the results of such methods often contradict their own stylistic analyses, but also because science is accurate, science doesn't lie, the observations of science are conclusive, and scientific methods supposedly transcend human failings. Art history seems trapped in a conundrum, choked by the subjectivity of its claims. But in dating Benin bronzes, the science labs that test these objects are also trapped, not so much by the certitude of their claims but by the application of those claims. While test results are no doubt precise, application of the results that serves the interests of galleries and clients' hopes for early dates borders on obfuscation and self-delusion, even fraud.

The lab results are excellent, but what do they mean? Scientists and lab analysts are inclined to see what they expect to see, to support what they have been told they would see, and to conclude that their results are scientifically valid and therefore infallible. That is how lab equipment is designed, experiments arranged, and hypotheses tested. But error is a normal part of science, skepticism is its conscience, and control experiments uncover flaws in reasoning or measurement. For the moment, stylistic analysis, whatever the limitations, must serve as that control to ensure that good science and informed art historical opinions prevail over bad science and Pascal's Wager.

In science a distinction is made between precision and accuracy. Precision is how closely two measured values agree with each other. Accuracy is how close a measured value is to the actual true value. Hence, measurements can be accurate but not precise and vice versa. Phrenology is an example. Everyone these days knows that men's brains are larger than women's, based on sexual dimorphism, but only a fool believes that the brain size of Homo sapiens sapiens has anything to do with intelligence. However, first marbles and then, for greater precision, bird seed provided the nineteenth-century anatomist Stanley Morton with the evidence for superior male intelligence, as Steven J. Gould tells us in The Mismeasure of Man. Even greater precision was achieved in the early twentieth century with calipers that measured cranial size and cross-cultural personality, leading the Germans, French, and English to argue over who had the largest brains, only to blow one another's out in World War I.