Page 134 - China's Renaissance in Bronze, The Robert H.CIague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes 1100-1900

Tang-dynasty silver, ring-punched grounds had been revived by late Ming
times and sometimes appear in works by Hu Wenming [see 12]; such grounds
not only provide a foil for the plain letters, making them easier to read,
they also conceal the telltale chisel marks imparted in the excavation of
the sunken ground. The black composition rubbed into the rings of the
punched ground further enhances legibility. In their slightly mannered
style the Chinese characters in the carved mark on the base reflect some-
thing of the decorative flair of the Arabic letters; in addition, the characters
of the mark are also set against a textured ground. Although cast ele-
ments were finished through extensive cold working on many late Ming
bronzes [see 11,13], it was probably not until the eighteenth century that
bronzes came to be decorated entirely after casting through cold-working
techniques 22 [compare 22]. In this case, the stiffness of the Arabic letters
and the slight irregularities and imperfections in the borders point to a
nineteenth-century date of manufacture.
In the nineteenth century could Arabic inscriptions have been chis-
eled into an undecorated censer of earlier date? This question is not easily
answered, though two points argue against the possibility, at least in this
case. As mentioned above, the censer's wide lip compares with the similar
ones that sometimes appear on nineteenth-century cloisonne censers with
Arabic inscriptions, suggesting that the Clague censer is a late exponent of
the Xuande censer type, presumably of the same date as the inscription.
More importantly, an identical bronze censer in the collection of Professor
Yussif Ibish has the the same Arabic inscriptions in the same unusual script
with its swollen vertical strokes. 23 Coincidence of shape, decoration, and
style suggest that the two censers were produced by the same workshop
at the same time; it seems unlikely indeed that if in the nineteenth century
Arabic inscriptions were added to earlier censers, the censers themselves
would be identical in shape and style.

134 1 0 C H I N A ' S R E N A I S S A N C E IN B R O N Z E