Page 29 - China's Renaissance in Bronze, The Robert H.CIague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes 1100-1900

the introduction of another censer shape: a vessel with a deep cup-like
container resting on a flaring pedestal base and with a wide horizontal rim
at the mouth. 3 Several variations on that shape evolved during the Song,
some with naturalistic covers in the form of ducks, lions, and other animals. 4
The wide-lipped censers and those with naturalistic covers doubtless served
both religious and secular worlds.
With the rediscovery of antiquity in the Northern Song, well-to-do
Chinese began to collect ancient bronze vessels, appropriating ding tripods,
gui bowls, and cylindrical-zun wine containers as incense burners and gu
beakers and trumpet-mouthed zun vessels as flower vases on special occa-
sions. The collectors of the Song and later periods realized that they were
using the ancient vessels in ways very different from those for which they
were made, and frequent purchase of the ancient bronzes could impoverish
them, so they commissioned new censers in ancient styles, some in bronze
and some in glazed ceramic ware. 5 By Yuan and early Ming times it was
thought that vessels of bronze were best suited for the winter months and
ones of ceramic ware for the summer ones, necessitating the alternation of
bronze and ceramic forms with the rotation of the seasons. 6
Like the previous hu vessel [1], this censer is an archaistic piece. The
form derives from a three-legged cylindrical wine vessel of a type known
as zun that was introduced late in the Warring States period and that flour-
ished in the Han dynasty, with examples extant in bronze, jade, and ceramic
ware. 7 (Song-dynasty antiquarians identified vessels of this type as lian, or
cosmetic boxes, by which name they have generally been known until
recent times; the inscriptions on two similarly shaped vessels of Han date
excavated in the 1960s term them zun and show them to be 'warm wine'
8
vessels.) Typically set on legs in the shape of crouching bears, Han-dynasty
zun occasionally rest on cabriole legs, though apparently not on ones of
anthropomorphic shape, even though a few Eastern Zhou bronzes sit atop
legs in the form of standing humans. 9 Han examples generally have two ring-
handles suspended from animal-mask escutcheons. Ancient zun vessels
range from unornamented to elaborately patterned; although the deco-
rated ones embrace a variety of subject matter, from dragons amidst clouds
to mountainous landscapes with ferocious beasts, floral arabesques do
not figure among them. In looking to antiquity, the Song bronze casters
who made this censer appropriated the general form of a Han-dynasty
zun with its flat base, gently tapering cylindrical walls, pushou-mask han-
dles, and three legs, but they altered the form of the legs and substituted
a new decorative scheme.

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 2 5