A WOOD, COPPER AND BRASS RELIQUARY FIGURE, BOHO-NO-BWÉTÉGabon, Mahongwe51 cm highProvenance: Italian private collection.This kind of sculpture, with accentuated stylized anthropomorphic characters, was usually placed on the top of a container with a lid in which the bones of a high-ranking deceased were kept.The Mahongwe, located in northern Gabon, made reliquary figures quite different from those of the other Kota groups. The faces of the ancestor portrayed in this sculpture are in fact characterized by a radical idealization that takes on rarefied and evocative plastic forms.* The reliquary is accompanied by scientific analyzes of the wood which confirm a dating to the first half of the twentieth century.