Page 132 - China's Renaissance in Bronze, The Robert H.CIague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes 1100-1900

early fifteenth. Chinese decorative arts with such inscriptions embrace a
range of dates, the earliest ones dating to the sixteenth century but the
majority to the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth.
Barring a handful of Yuan-dynasty porcelains with Arabic letters
discreetly incorporated into their decorative schemes and presumably made
solely for export to the Near and Middle East, 6 the earliest Jingdezhen
blue-and-white wares with Arabic/Persian decorative inscriptions date to
the early sixteenth-century reign of the Zhengde Emperor; 7 although a
few blue-and-white porcelains from the succeeding Jiajing reign also boast
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such inscriptions, the number of Jingdezhen porcelains with Arabic/Persian
inscriptions decreased markedly after the Zhengde era. However, several late
seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Dehua porcelains with carved
Arabic letters indicate that such decorative schemes persisted into the
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Qing dynasty. A Qianlong-marked blue-glass vase in the Brooklyn Museum
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has a carved Arabic inscription set against a textured ground, and several
nineteenth-century cloisonne enamel censers 11 and Dehua porcelains 12 have
Arabic-letter inscriptions, indicating that works so ornamented were pro-
duced throughout the Qing dynasty in various media. Surviving works
clearly show that inscriptions composed of Arabic letters were used as
decoration from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries; although
doubtless correct in some instances, that tenet of traditional knowledge
holding that most bronzes and ceramics with inscriptions in Arabic letters
were produced in the sixteenth century for use by palace eunuchs must
be set aside in favor of more judicious attributions.
Arabic and Persian inscriptions on sixteenth-century blue-and-white
porcelains appear within cartouches of various shapes - square, rectan-
gular, circular, ogival - and they are typically set amid floral scrolls called
'Muhammadan scrolls/ Such sixteenth-century decorative inscriptions 13
are usually smaller in proportion to the vessel than those on the Clague
censer and they include both religious and secular statements, the latter
ranging from moral precepts to prosaic descriptive terms; 14 very few six-
teenth-century porcelains feature Koranic inscriptions. Eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century examples of glass, ceramics, and cloisonne enamel with
decoration of Arabic letters tend to have large inscriptions of a religious
nature set in ogival panels; glass and ceramic pieces from the mid- and
late Qing often employ such inscriptions to the exclusion of decorative
motifs, but cloisonne enamels continue to set them in floral (usually lotus)
scrolls. The characteristics of seventeenth-century examples remain a mys-
tery, since few pieces of seventeenth-century date have been identified.

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