A Fon fetish sculpture, Southern Togo, abstractly carved with encrusted patina; signs of ritual use and age. Fon sculptures, produced largely in the southern region of present-day Benin, form a corpus of ritual and commemorative artworks central to the political and religious life of the Kingdom of Dahomey from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century. Their stylistic character is defined by a restrained realism, an emphasis on frontal symmetry, and a strong sense of corporeal solidity. Many pieces were commissioned by the royal court at Abomey, where artists worked under the patronage of successive kings who used sculpture to legitimize authority and to articulate dynastic history. The resulting corpus includes royal portraiture, devotional figures, and objects linked to military and palace protocol. Central to the tradition are bocio, power figures conceived as active agents in the negotiation of spiritual protection and social control. Unlike the more elaborate ensemble of nails and added materials associated with Kongo minkisi, Fon bocio often reveal a comparatively austere treatment of the body, though they may be encrusted with sacrificial matter or wrapped with cords that signify the binding or activation of metaphysical forces. Their agency is believed to derive from the collaboration between sculptors and ritual specialists, the latter determining the assemblage of substances placed within cavities or applied to the surface to charge the figure¹. These sculptures are therefore not purely representational; they are containers of potency, understood within Fon epistemologies as instruments that mediate between visible and invisible realms. Royal sculpture developed parallel to these ritual forms. Kings commissioned portrait figures and palace reliefs both to commemorate historical events and to embody the sovereign’s political charisma. Court artists, organized in hereditary guilds, adhered to an aesthetic vocabulary that emphasized clarity of silhouette, the measured articulation of limbs, and carefully rendered facial features imbued with solemnity. Some portraits, especially those produced in the nineteenth century, reveal a shift toward heightened naturalism, likely reflecting increased contact with European materials and observers². These courtly works functioned as part of a broader system of palace arts, which included appliqué textiles, metalwork, and monumental architecture, all contributing to the visual rhetoric of kingship. Funerary and commemorative sculptures also occupy an important place in the corpus. Wooden figures associated with royal ancestors were displayed in ceremonies that reaffirmed lineage continuity, while certain works, sometimes referred to as asen in their sculptural variants, served as loci for communion with the dead. Their metal counterparts are more widely known, but wooden sculptural forms likewise acted as focal points for rites intended to maintain reciprocal obligations between the living and the departed³. Through these commemorative forms, sculpture became a medium in which social memory was enacted, re-inscribed, and contested. Many Fon sculptures collected during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries entered Western museums through colonial campaigns, missionary activity, and commercial trade, raising persistent debates regarding provenance, restitution, and the interpretation of sacred works in secular contexts. Their display today requires careful mediation between historical documentation, contemporary Fon perspectives, and ethical considerations surrounding the handling of charged ritual objects. Yet despite these complexities, the sculptural tradition remains an essential testimony to the intellectual and political sophistication of the Dahomean court and its wider cultural milieu. References Blier, Suzanne Preston. African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power. University of Chicago Press, 1995. Hersak, Dunja. "Fon." In Africa: The Art of a Continent, edited by Tom Phillips. Prestel, 1995. Bay, Edna G. Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey. University of Virginia Press, 1998.