Page 100 - China's Renaissance in Bronze, The Robert H.CIague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes 1100-1900

decoration inlaid in mother-of-pearl in the Florence and Herbert Irving
Collection; 4 with its conventional pushou-mask handles and tall, vertical
foot set off from the body, however, the Irving vase likely dates several
decades earlier than the Clague bronze.
The elephant-head handles are a charming feature of this vase.
Apparently native to China, elephants captured the imagination of the
Shang people, who used their ivory tusks as a material for carving and
who occasionally represented them on their bronzes, even basing several
famous ritual wine vessels on the elephant's bulky form. 5 Oracle bone
inscriptions from the time also include a character for 'elephant/ the
ancestor of the character in use today. Overzealous hunting led to the
disappearance of the elephant by Zhou times, so that it seldom appears
in the arts of the Warring States and Han periods. The Buddhist church
reintroduced the elephant to Chinese art in the early centuries of our era,
as it introduced the lion [see 14]. While the lion was considered the proper
mount (vahana) for the Bodhisattva ManjusrT (Chinese, Wenshu pusa), the
elephant - in particular, a six-tusked, white elephant - was regarded as
the appropriate vehicle for the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra (Chinese,
Puxian pusa). In addition, the Buddha's mother, Queen Maya, dreamt that
at the moment of her son's conception a small white elephant entered her
side. An emblem of royalty in India, the elephant played an important role
in Buddhist symbolism and came to hold an important place in East Asian
Buddhist art. Although the elephant appears in Chinese Buddhist painting,
in Tang-dynasty wall paintings at Tunhuang, for example, and although it
occasionally turns up in the inhabited vine scrolls on Tang silver, 6 it never
garnered the same widespread popularity as the lion in the secular arts.
Beginning in the Song and Yuan periods, however, the taste for ornament
7
led designers of both bronzes and ceramics 8 occasionally to fashion handles
in the form of elephant heads, their trunks supporting decorative rings.
Although the handles on this vase resemble feline heads, the triangular
ears and flattened, almond-shaped eyes identify them as elephant heads.

The decorative scheme on this vase continues the trends, noted in
seventeenth-century works [compare 15], toward ornamentation and com-
plexity, increasing the number of masks on each face to three and presenting
the masks in a florid style but without leiwen backgrounds. In addition,
the decorative scheme introduces a note of playful ambiguity, such that
the central mask on each side can be read in two ways: as a single, frontal
taotie mask and as a pair of large-eyed, parrot-beaked birds seen in
profile. Disconcerting in a frontal mask, the eyes with their off-center pupils

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