Page 187 - China's Renaissance in Bronze, The Robert H.CIague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes 1100-1900

animals derive from ritual bronze ding vessels of the Western Zhou period.
Of loop type, the handles of most Shang and early Western Zhou ding
vessels spring directly from the vessel lip, but by the tenth century BC,
ding vessels were sometimes fitted with lids, necessitating a shift of the
handles from the lip to the upper vessel wall. The earliest of such vessels
have L-shaped handles that rise vertically, 6 but from the early Eastern Zhou
onward the vertical elements often incorporate a slight curve. 7 So-called
heaven-soaring handles, large, S-curved handles like those on the Clague
censer, apparently first appeared during the Song. Interpretations of the
d/ng-shaped censer were cast during the centuries from Song to Qing,
but illustrations in woodblock-printed books indicate that from the Yuan
dynasty onward ones of compressed globular form with heaven-soaring
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handles were preferred for use on altars. The ancestry of the present censer
can be traced through related bronze examples produced during earlier
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10
Qing reigns, to similar ones made during the Ming, to fourteenth-century
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blue-and-white porcelain ones based on bronze models.
Archaeological excavations at Song sites have yielded pricket candle-
sticks with bell-shaped bases and dished drip trays, though such Song
pieces usually lack the tall columns that are characteristic of Yuan, Ming,
and Qing examples. 12 Ancestors of the present pieces, candlesticks with
tall columns number among the items recovered from the remains of the
Chinese merchant ship that sank off the coast of Sinan, Republic of Korea,
in 1323. 13 Illustrations in woodblock-printed books confirm that pricket
candlesticks were definitely in use by Yuan times, some with bell-shaped
bases, 14 some with tripod stands. 15 Pricket candlesticks were produced in
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blue-and-white porcelain during the Ming dynasty and in cloisonne enamel, 17
carved red lacquer, and blue-and-white porcelain 18 during the Qing, the
Qing examples with the same shape as the Clague ones.
Song and Yuan book illustrations show that globular vases with long
necks [3] - sometimes with tubular appendages at the mouth in the manner
of a miniature touhu vessel [4, 9] - were frequently used in early times, 19
though baluster vases 20 [37] and pear-shaped ones predominated in the
Ming and Qing. Distantly descended from Bronze Age hu wine jars, these
vases represent the Qing incarnation of the pear-shaped vase that became
popular in the early Ming [7]. Handles of scalloped C-form, termed cloud-
scroll or ruy/-head handles, were an innovation of the Qianlong era. 21
Regarded already in late Zhou and Han cosmology as one of the four
directional animals, the green dragon represents the east, alongside the red
phoenix of the south, the white tiger of the west, and the intertwined

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T H E R O B E R T II. C L A G U E C O L L E C T I O N