Page 76 - China's Renaissance in Bronze, The Robert H.CIague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes 1100-1900

By Ming times, the taotie and certain other creatures from antiquity
were generally understood to be ferocious beasts of such insatiable appetite
that they consumed their own bodies; that understanding explains the
curious handles on Hu Wenming censers, which often take the form of a
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fanciful animal head swallowing its own fur-covered body. The column of
stylized vertebrae along the outer edge of the handle confirms the identi-
fication of the ring as an animal's body.
Unlike the previous incense box [11], this censer was not cast but
hammered from a sheet of copper, in the manner that a silversmith might
raise a vessel from a sheet of silver. Entirely cold worked, the decorative
elements stand in slight relief above their textured grounds, many of them
surrounded by a sunken outline whose beveled outer edge makes the
relief appear much higher than it actually is. The decoration was worked
only from the exterior on this thick-walled vessel, with no hammering on
the interior to raise the relief elements; the interior is thus smooth and
plain, with only faint echoes of the exterior's decorative scheme. The prin-
cipal ornamental elements may have been struck with an intaglio die to
define their general form and raise their relief, but their interior drawing
and finishing details were chased and chiseled with a variety of burins,
points, and punches, as were the formalized wave and ring-mat grounds.
Among extant censers with closely related designs, none has identically
executed motifs, revealing both the extent of the cold working and the
attention paid to each vessel. Attached with rivets (whose heads are visible
on the interior), the cast bronze handles find exact counterparts on other
vessels, 28 indicating that their molds were no doubt prepared from stan-
dard models kept in the workshop. Only traces remain of the gilding that
originally covered the lip, footring, handles, relief elements, and raised
bands between registers. Applied through the mercury-gilding process
[see 11], the layer of parcel gilding was extremely thin and thus readily
subject to wear; having disappeared from the raised areas, the remaining
gold appears largely in the hollows of the design.
If the decorative scheme with its two feiyu and other sea creatures
dates this censer to the Ming dynasty, the theme having first appeared in
Yuan or early Ming times and having virtually disappeared by the early
Qing, 29 its similarity in style to a Wanli-marked blue-and-white porcelain
bowl 30 in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, places it solidly in the late
Ming. The taste for bright, contrasting colors also signals its late Ming
date, as do the interest in narrative - even the handles tell stories - and the

1 10 C H I N A ' S R E N A I S S A N C E IN B R O N Z E