During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the Portuguese court collected and commissioned objects of art from artists working in Sierra Leone. The patronage of West African art formed an important part of the visual culture of the Portuguese court and was integral to the king’s larger artistic and cultural program intended to enhance his prestige and to promote his imperial ideology to other European courts. These objects of luxury art, the product of cross-cultural interaction, participated in decisive ways to the construction of the personal mythology of the Portuguese king and to the fashioning of an iconology of royal power in Europe.

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