Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch's A 16th Century Imperial Monument is widely regarded as a major scholarly reference work for the interpretation of the Benin Plaques. Particularly noteworthy is Gunsch's approach of understanding the relief plaques not as isolated artworks, but as components of a larger imperial and architectural program of the Benin court. In this respect, the book undoubtedly makes an important contribution to the art-historical reassessment of the plaques.
Gunsch employs the flanges as art-historical "graphs" to identify specific workshops or artists, arguing that these elements evolved from mere decorative features into workshop signatures and chronological markers. The epistemological premise behind this approach—the derivation of historical relationships from recurring formal details—is not new. It was already employed by Giovanni Morelli in the nineteenth century, who sought to identify Renaissance artists through stylistic comparison, following the principle that "ear A resembles ear B," and therefore both paintings may have been executed by the same master.
From a critical perspective, however, the study remains firmly rooted within an art-historical and museum-centered framework. Scientific methods such as metallurgical analysis, isotope studies, or thermoluminescence dating play almost no role, despite the far-reaching chronological conclusions being advanced. Dating is based predominantly on stylistic analysis, historical accounts, and oral traditions. As a result, it remains unclear whether the proposed workshop phases can in fact be demonstrated with certainty.
Moreover, the research focuses almost exclusively on objects catalogued in museum collections. Plaques held in private collections, digital archives, or independent publications are largely excluded, even though such comparative material could provide important evidence concerning stylistic development, casting techniques, or alternative chronologies. This methodological limitation is also evident in the Digital Benin project, where colonial history and restitution narratives are often emphasized more strongly than material-scientific investigation.
The phenomenon of scholars who might be expected to work in a fully interdisciplinary manner, yet choose not to do so, has a long tradition. In this regard, I am reminded of the Gosel *1 affair: the inscribed clay tablets discovered by a farmer and declared forgeries in 1924 by the then Director of the Louvre. The institutions that determine the scope of scholarly inquiry are often the same institutions that stand to lose if their conclusions prove incorrect. That is the problem—not the failing of an individual scholar, but a structural issue that persists to the present day. In the case of Glosel, the response came in 1974, roughly fifty years after the discovery of the tablets. An institute in Oxfordshire examined the finds using thermoluminescence dating. The decisive answer emerged not from art-historical or archaeological arguments, but from physics.
Today, thermoluminescence analysis itself is another fifty years older than the correction provided by the British institute. Yet scholars—and in this specific case, Professor Wysocki Gunsch—still do not appear to regard it as necessary to test art-historical hypotheses through scientific analysis. In doing so, art history risks becoming an object of history itself. A discipline that no longer operates according to the standards of contemporary knowledge becomes part of the history of scholarship rather than an active science. This is a structural problem that extends far beyond individual art historians. When I pointed out to Professor Suzanne Preston Blier * 2 that her hypothesis concerning the reconstruction of the well-known Tada figure did not correspond with examples that we had collected, her first response was to suggest that our Tada figures were probably copies.
The exemplary case of Glozel continues to haunt the humanities like a warning sign, even a century later. How seriously should museums be taken when they restitute Benin artefacts—however understandable the moral motivation in light of an act of historical barbarism *3—without first subjecting them to rigorous scientific examination? And what should we make of the humanities faculties at our universities that continue to rely on nineteenth-century stylistic methods when the natural sciences are often capable of providing far clearer answers?
*1 The case Gosel resp. Verbotene Archäologie
*2 A Tada figure, a controversy with Preston Blier
*3 Walter Benjamin: On the Concept of History., These VII "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.