Masque Marka - Mali (No reserve price)

Magnificent Bambara mask from Mali in wood, brass, and iron.
The Marka are an ethnicity very close to the Bambara, whose art is notably characterized by masks covered with brass plaques, like this one.
Among the Marka, Do is the spirit to whom the masks give form and whose expression they constitute.
Do comes from the bush via the leaf mask and, in some mythic cases, via masks of fiber with a head carved in wood.
In the religious system of Marka society, Do is the most invoked and its cult the most elaborate.
The Marka are organized into structured and hierarchical mask societies.
There exists an initiation language of communication in the hands of the initiated.
Marka masks are a synthesis of stylistic components of the related Mandé peoples of Mali, and of their neighbors in Burkina Faso.
Of the Mandé, they have kept the oval face with flat cheeks, and the "T" formed by the intersection of the nose and the brow ridges.