Page 80 - China's Renaissance in Bronze, The Robert H.CIague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes 1100-1900

encircled by a raised ring. 2 Also dating to the late Ming, a small carved
red-lacquer box in the Florence and Herbert Irving Collection, shares the
Clague box's size, shape, and proportions, and its narrow, undecorated lip,
though it has a different decorative scheme. 3
The decorative scheme on this box also comes directly from carved
lacquer, with only minor modifications. A Song or Yuan circular covered
box in the Avery Brundage Collection, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco,
and another in the Florence and Herbert Irving Collection, are carved with
a design of two chi dragons on their covers. 4 Shown from above and
enveloped in scrolling clouds, the striding chilong turn their heads to look
at each other, each bearing a small sprig of lingzhi fungus. Retaining the
main components of the design, the Clague box eliminates the scrolling
clouds, replacing them with lingzhi fungi of increased size and with the
formalized patterns created by the chi dragons' long tails and curling wisps
of flame. In typical late Ming style, the Clague box makes the design readily
comprehensible by arranging it in a strictly symmetrical fashion and by
segregating the principal motifs from the background, texturing the latter
and raising the former in slight relief, a technique already introduced into
lacquer in the fifteenth century, as shown by a small covered box carved
with a design of two lions playing with a brocaded ball, 5 in the National
Palace Museum, Taipei. Although scrolling clouds adorn the sides of the
Irving box, two chilong ornament those of the Brundage box, again pro-
viding the prototype for the Clague box.

The chilong enjoyed an ancient lineage in China, appearing at least
as early as the Warring States period and finding widespread popularity in
6
the Han, especially as decoration on jades. With the decline of interest in
things foreign in late Tang and the renewed interest in antiquity in early
Song, the chilong experienced a renaissance, finding a home in the orna-
7
ment of bronzes, lacquers, ceramics, and jades, from Song through Qing.
Although the convention of dragons, birds, and felines biting them-
8
selves dates at least to the Warring States period, that of animals bearing
auspicious plants originated much later, probably in the Tang. The animals
in the inhabited vine scrolls on Tang mirrors and on Tang gold and silver
pieces sometimes bite their encircling stalk, for example, and a shallow Tang
silver bowl - excavated in 1970 from an eighth-century site at Hejiacun, near
Xi'an -features on its floor a design of two confronting lions, each grasping
9
a floral scroll in its mouth. Though not a frequently occurring motif, small
jade sculptures representing animals bearing branches of auspicious plants
begin to appear in increasing numbers in the Song and Yuan periods, as

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