Relief plaque showing a painted youth

This bronze plaque is part of a set of more than 800 that once decorated the pillars in the audience hall of the Oba, or king, of Benin. A young man stands in the center, nude except for his rich jewelry and detailed body painting. The high, coral-beaded necklaces, beaded anklets and metal bracelets on his arms convey the young man's elite status. On his stomach and above his eyebrows, scarifications mark the young man as a subject of the Oba. Scholars disagree about the identification of this young man. Many say that he is Crown Prince Odogbo (reigned about 1606 to about 1640), son of Oba Ehengbuda (reigned about 1578 to 1608). Odogbo was rumored to have been born a girl, and so Oba Ehengbuda asked his son and other young men of his son's age to parade nude through the streets of Benin City in order to prove that Odogbo was indeed a young man and eligible to assume the throne. To these scholars, the presence of a high-ranking nude young man as a subject of a plaque seems to illustrate Odogbo's history. Other scholars date the plaque corpus to the mid-16th century on the basis of the artists' technical and stylistic decisions in the corpus as a whole, and according to this theory the person depicted could not be the 17th century Oba.