Page 108 - China's Renaissance in Bronze, The Robert H.CIague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes 1100-1900

their petals do not fold over on themselves - their unusual tripartite centers
are virtually identical. In delicacy of interpretation, the mallow blossom on
the base of this censer recalls the flowers on Ming carved lacquerware. 6
By the Yuan and Ming periods, fashion dictated that ceramics, jades,
and lacquers, not to mention works in a variety of other materials, be well
finished on their undersides; in fact, the finest works of the day often
display bases as intricately finished as their more readily visible upper
7
surfaces, even works in jade and lacquer. The exquisitely finished flower
on the base of this censer finds its closest counterparts in the related
flowers that sometimes ornament the bases of works from the mid-Ming
period. Produced during the second half of the sixteenth century, a carved
red lacquer bowl, formerly in the collection of Sir Harry Garner, London, has
a flower at the center of its base, the blossom with twelve overlapping
8
petals; and a late sixteenth-century cloisonne basin, formerly in the Clague
Collection and now in the Phoenix Art Museum, has a flower at the center of
its broad base, the elaborate blossom with two tiers of overlapping petals,
seven in the inner ring and nine in the outer one. 9 Such pieces permit an
attribution to the second half of the sixteenth century for this censer.
Native to China, the lotus, which decorates the walls of this censer,
was celebrated in the ancient poetry of the Shijing, or Book of Songs, but
its appearance in the visual arts had to await the coming of the Han, when
it was occasionally depicted in pictorial tiles, especially ones from Sichuan
province. 10 Even so, it was only with the rise of the Buddhist church in the
early centuries of our era that the lotus became a staple of Chinese art. A
symbol of the church and its teachings, 11 the lotus figures prominently in
Buddhist art, appearing in altar vases, in the hands of bodhisattvas, in the
borders surrounding images of deities, and, most conspicuously, in the form
of the bases on which deities stand or sit. In the secular arts, the lotus was
regarded as an emblem of purity and perfection. One of the 'flowers of
the four seasons,' the lotus symbolizes summer, standing alongside the
peony, chrysanthemum, and plum, which symbolize, respectively, spring,
autumn, and winter. In addition, the lotus also symbolizes the seventh month
in the Chinese calendar (generally corresponding to August in the Western
calendar) and the mallow, whose form the censer imitates, stands for the
ninth month (corresponding to October).
The lotus had been introduced into mainstream secular arts by the
Southern Dynasties period, appearing occasionally as decoration in fifth-
12
and sixth-century celadon vessels from the Yue kilns; by the Tang dynasty,
the lotus frequently appeared on articles of gold and silver, 13 and by the

1 10 C H I N A ' S R E N A I S S A N C E IN B R O N Z E