Yoruba blacksmiths created some of the most impressive bronze work in Africa. Their art is intimately connected with essential aspects of Yoruba life-- religion, cultural activities and kingship, fused together by the fire of the furnace and the artist's imagination. We see revolving around this wonderful bracelet four figures which probably represent ancestors or deities. They stand frontally with their dramatic faces clearly and expressively detailed. Their arms and legs, however, merge into the abstract design surrounding them, as if to show they are part human and part mythical being with no definite form. This otherworldly aspect may have been intentional in order to show the wearer as someone who possessed special powers, such as a priest or priestess. The power of this bracelet communicates something that is at once explicable and indefinable; like the gods themselves, within reach and yet inaccessible, except through the medium of high art.