Royal anthropomorphic box Mangbetu people, north-east D.R. Congo Wood with pyrographic decoration, sewn bark Height: 59 cm. Provenance: Acquired by Dr. Védy around 1895 and kept by his family. Bernard Dulon and Philippe Guimiot (1995) Private collection Publications : Philippe Guimiot, Tribal arts, n°18, 1998, back cover Doctor Védy's box The Mangbetu people's enthusiasm for everyday carved objects, as witnessed by the region's first explorers, is the result of a cultural promotion initiative set up very early on by the Mangbetu kings. In 1913, during a mission to the Uélé region commissioned by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, German zoologist Herbert Lang and ornithologist James Paul Chapin met King Okondo and obtained a number of art and craft objects from him. The king's aim was to "restore to the kingdom the prestige it had lost, at least through the reconstitution of the court and the development of the arts"[1]. As a result, the Mangbetu courts were prodigious, and many knives, ivory horns, harps, spoons, boxes and drums were offered to their visitors and neighbours, giving the plastic arts an ambassadorial role. The Mangbetu did not carve masks and very few ancestral statues. Their famous boxes, once thought to be honey containers, were in fact used to store precious objects, jewellery, combs, medicinal powders and other talismans. The most elaborate of all, and also the rarest, were the anthropomorphic boxes, probably made for the king and important notables. Acquired at the end of the 19th century, Dr Védy's box is an important example of an archaic form of the Mangbetu style. His face is turned towards the sky, his chin in the same horizontal plane as his headdress. The teeth are visible, a reminder of the cannibalistic practices that were once deeply rooted in the region. Finally, the legs, whose special knee-calf treatment gives the sculpture as a whole an apparent stability on the ground and a vertical dynamism. Despite its antiquity within its culture, Dr Védy's box, a true masterpiece of the archaic Mangbetu style, is not an isolated example in the corpus. The Musée d'Histoire Naturelle in La Rochelle (inv. H 1842) and the Völkerkundemuseum in Heidelberg (inv. 2 1246) both possess an example so stylistically comparable that it is possible to attribute these three works to the production of a specialised workshop, or even to the hand of the same artist. Bernard Dulon [1] Schildkrout & Keim, 1990, African Reflections: Art from Northeastern Zaire