Page 50 - China's Renaissance in Bronze, The Robert H.CIague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes 1100-1900

As evinced by vertical, casting-mold seams that rise through the sides
of both ornamental bands, the decoration on this vase was integrally cast
with the vessel itself, thus maintaining continuity with Song and Yuan
vessels in technique of execution. With the bulk of its surface undecorated,
however, this vase exhibits the new, simplified style that is characteristic
8
of early Ming, both in bronze and in blue-and-white porcelain . Already
apparent in a nascent stage of development in some Song-Yuan vessels
[see 6], the new style eschews the exuberant, all-encompassing designs
typical of the Song-Yuan phase of development [compare 3-5] in favor of a
reserved, clearly focused design scheme.
The most easily discernible change in the presentation of the taotie
mask is the substitution of a ground of tightly coiled spirals for the ground
of angular, square-cornered leiwen - sometimes with interior patterns -
of Song and Yuan vessels. Other newly introduced Ming features include
the curly mane [compare 43] framing the leonine head that anchors each
ring handle, and the emphatic foot, which is much taller than those of
Song and Yuan bronzes. In a fashion characteristic of early fifteenth-century
blue-and-white porcelain, the wave pattern emphasizes the undulating
movement of the water rather than the breaking waves and whitecaps that
figured so prominently in Song and Yuan ceramics 9 and bronzes [see 6].
Additionally, the ring handles now frame the decorative band, rather than
arbitrarily intruding into it, and the bilaterally symmetrical organization (of
both shape and decoration) dominates even more than in earlier vessels.
The attribution of this vessel to the early Ming period and the desig-
nation of its function as a vase rest on its similarity in shape to two identical
(seemingly undecorated) bronze vases recovered in 1955 - along with a large
bronze d/ng-shaped censer and a wealth of other goods - from a tomb
dated to 1510 at Baima-si (White Horse Temple) near Chengdu, Sichuan
10
province. The excavation revealed that the pair of vases stood on a stone
altar in the anterior room of the undisturbed, two-chambered tomb, flanking
the ding-shaped censer; in depictions of similar arrangements of two vases
and a censer in Yuan and Ming woodblock-book illustrations, such vases
invariably hold flowers. 11 Like the Clague example, the excavated vases
are of elongated pear-shape; each rests on a tall foot that rises in two
stages and that is mirrored in the configuration of the neck and lip, exactly
as in the Clague vase. The ring handles resemble each other on the Clague
and Baima-si vases, especially the leonine heads from whose mouths the
rings issue. The two Baima-si vases have moveable rings, confirming that
the Clague vase doubtless once had such rings as well.

4 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