Page 30 - China's Renaissance in Bronze, The Robert H.CIague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes 1100-1900

The decorative scheme on the Clague vessel lacks prototypes in the
archaic bronze tradition; in its taste for an all-over pattern that features
floral motifs in panels surrounded by repeating design elements, however,
it accords well with ceramic vessels produced late in the Southern Song
and Yuan periods, especially jars and bottles with painted decoration
produced at the Jizhou kilns in central Jiangxi province. The relics recently
excavated from the Chinese merchant ship that sank off the coast of Sinan,
Republic of Korea, in 1323, for example, include a small painted Jizhou
bottle with two eight-lobed foliate panels set against a ground of scrolling
feather-like foliage, one panel featuring a blossom and the other a motif
of rolling waves. 10 Although such Jizhou ceramics did not serve as the
direct inspiration for the present bronze censer, they provide a context for
the elaborate patterning.
The exact source for the decorative scheme on this censer remains
a mystery, since highly stylized, geometricized blossoms set in angular,
diamond-shaped panels are not a feature either of ancient bronzes or of
Song and Yuan ceramics. The design might well have been influenced by
textiles or by architectural motifs, 11 but it might also have been sparked by
details in Song-period woodblock-printed illustrations. The frontispiece to
each of the seven scrolls of a Lotus Sutra printed about 1160, now in the
collection of Rikkyo-an, a sub-temple of Daitoku-ji, Kyoto, Japan, depicts a
Buddha surrounded by attendants, the Buddha seated on a lotus dais behind
an altar on a paved terrace. 12 Set at a slight angle, the paving tiles in these
frontispieces create a pattern whose overall effect bears a superficial resem-
blance to a compact but well defined leiwen ground. Each of the small tiles
in the frontispieces sports a stylized flower head at its center, a reduced
form of the paving tiles portrayed in Tang-dynasty woodblock-printed sutra
frontispieces, such as that prefacing a text of Diamond Sutra, 13 printed in 868,
recovered at Dunhuang and now in the British Museum, London, which por-
trays the Buddha seated on a lotus throne on a paved terrace in discourse
with his disciple Subhuti and surrounded by attendants. The paving tiles
illustrated in such frontispieces were based on actual ceramic tiles.
The diamond-shaped lozenges (excepting their leiwen borders) and
the stylized blossoms on the Clague censer correspond closely to orna-
mental architectural tiles 14 and to the paving tiles depicted in the 868
Diamond Sutra. Even the arrangement of the repeating design elements
on the censer suggests the layout of tiles, whether on a building wall or in
a paved courtyard. Such similarities do not prove a relationship between

2 6 C H I N A ' S R E N A I S S A N C E IN B R O N Z E