Page 16 - China's Renaissance in Bronze, The Robert H.CIague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes 1100-1900

Except for those with gold or silver inlays, bronzes from the Song,
Yuan, and early Ming almost always have decoration integrally cast with
the vessel itself. From the mid-Ming onward, bronzes begin to rely on cold
work (chasing and chiseling after casting) for their decoration [19, 50]. By
the late Ming, the decoration on most bronzes was imparted through cold
work [11,13, 45-47]; from the late Ming on, some bronzes were not cast at
all, but raised, or hammered, from sheet copper [12,41]. Late Ming arti-
sans expanded their range of sources for both shape and decoration to
include contemporaneous lacquers, jades, porcelains, ivories, and cloisonne
enamels; as a result, new, often playful, shapes and motifs appear [9,13,14],
including many objects for the scholar's desk [44-49]. In the absence of dated
inscriptions and archaeological data, such borrowings make the compar-
ative method especially useful for dating.
Although literary records mention bronze casters, the tradition remains
largely anonymous because so few bronzes are inscribed with their place
of manufacture or maker's name. History has preserved a number of bronzes
by the celebrated Hu Wenming of Yunjian (modern Songjiang, near Shanghai),
two of which are in the Clague Collection [11,12]. More bronzes bear the
mark of Shisou than any other, including four in the Clague Collection [16-
18, 55], but attributions to his hand remain unverifiable.
Often large [31, 37-39], Qing bronzes were cast as well as raised
from sheet metal [41] or assembled from hammered components [26-29,
39]. Although they sometimes resemble those of Ming bronzes, the deco-
rative schemes of Qing bronzes range from archaistic [37] to abstract [34-
35], from formalistic [38-39] to naturalistic [26-29, 33, 56] and even eclectic
[31-32]. Bronzes of the Kangxi period show a taste for a yin-yang pairing of
complementary opposites [21,32] and for abstract, gold-splashed decor
derived from Xuande bronzes [34]; those of the Yongzheng and Qianlong
eras reveal a preference for floral designs [27-29], archaistic dragons [37],
and dragon-and-phoenix motifs [37-38]. Popular already in the late Ming,
designs wishing the viewer wealth [27], marital happiness [56], and success
in the civil service examinations [48, 57] became even more so in the Qing.
Late eighteenth-century bronzes occasionally feature asymmetrical designs
that represent a radical departure from tradition [40], whereas nineteenth-
century ones espouse a new-found economy of material, substituting over-
lays of gold and silver for the more costly inlays of earlier centuries [42]. At
their best, Qing bronzes show exquisitely finished surfaces unrivalled by
those of other post-Tang examples [34, 37-39].

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