Page 43 - China's Renaissance in Bronze, The Robert H.CIague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes 1100-1900

animal heads from whose mouths the four legs on the reservoir issue rep-
resent an early type, akin in style to the horned heads at the tops of ring
handles on Song and Yuan bronzes [compare 6].
Lacking clear prototypes from antiquity, this incense holder shows
less reliance on Bronze Age shapes than do many other Song and Yuan
bronzes, a notable departure from classical Bronze Age taste being its
combination of reservoir and table-like stand. Miniature bronzes had been
mounted on bronze stands at least as early as the Northern Wei period, 5
their four-legged, square stands virtually identical in form to the bases of
contemporaneous gilt bronze Buddhist sculptures. Whether the present
incense holder represents a continuation of that tradition of mounted
bronzes, or whether it represents a reinvention of the combination remains
unknown. The closest parallels to the combination seen here occur among
Yuan dynasty ceramics - especially qingbai, Jun, and Longquan-celadon
wares which, perhaps under the influence of Song or Yuan bronzes, occa-
sionally have a vessel set atop an integrally fired decorative stand in the
6
form of a stool or table. The excavations of the Chinese merchant ship that
sank off the coast of Sinan (Republic of Korea) in 1323 have yielded a circular
bronze hu-shaped incense stick holder with openwork decoration and with
an elaborately pierced foot that resembles a small table or stand. 7
The stands represented in such bronze and ceramic pieces compare
with furniture of the day. In the graceful curvature of its legs, the elegant
cusping of its apron, and the openwork articulation of its waist, the
Clague vessel's six-legged table stand compares favorably with the small
table depicted in the lower left corner of Liu Guandao's Whiling away the
Summer, a late thirteenth-century handscroll in the Nelson-Atkins Museum
of Art, Kansas City. 8 Both the strongly curled feet of the four upper legs
and the continuous floor stretcher find counterparts on tables depicted in
woodblock-printed books of the Yuan and early Ming periods. 9 Especially
remarkable is the close kinship of the Clague vessel's table-stand to a
small, red-lacquered, hexagonal table with inset Dali marble top (collection
unknown) that Rosemary Scott has attributed to the Song dynasty; 10 related
elements in the two pieces include the overall shape with its hexagonal
form, the perforation of the waist with openwork designs, the cusping of
the apron in a bracketed profile (similar to that seen about the rim of large,
fourteenth-century, blue-and-white plates from Jingdezhen), 11 and the
graceful curvature of the legs.

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 3 9