Page 83 - China's Renaissance in Bronze, The Robert H.CIague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes 1100-1900

F HAMMERED COPPER, this small circular covered incense box
comprises two similarly shaped halves. Additionally, the box has a
O short vertical lip soldered to its inner edge to receive the cover and
a small circular depression in the center of its underside that serves as a
base. Box and cover are fully decorated on their exteriors and partially
embellished on their interiors with linear designs inlaid in silver wire.
Shown from above, five striding lions grace the cover, a single one in the
center surrounded by the four others arranged in a ring. Its body curled
to echo the cover's curvature, the lion in the center grasps the tail of its
nearest companion in the outer ring; most lions in the ring clutch the tail
of the preceding one, so that the design spirals outward. The silver-wire
inlays not only describe the lions' form but show off their windblown manes
and fur-tufted spines. Scrolling branches of auspicious lingzhi fungus com-
plete the design. The box is similarly decorated, but with four lions instead
of five, a single one in the center encircled by a ring of three. At the
center of the cover's interior is a bouquet comprising a spike of narcissus
with two blossoms and four leaves, a sprig of ruy/-headed lingzhi fungus,
and a section of jointed bamboo stalk with three clusters of leaves, all out-
lined in silver-wire inlay. The otherwise undecorated interior of the box has
at its center a mark of six kaishu (standard-script) characters inlaid in silver
wire in two columns.
Small boxes with identically shaped and decorated tops and bottoms,
even lacking a lip or foot to distinguish box from cover, appear among the
1
limited corpus of Han-dynasty silver. Though such a Han-dynasty box could
have surfaced in Ming times to be copied in bronze at the request of a late
Ming antiquarian, it is likely that this covered box descends ultimately from
Tang gold and silver boxes, sharing the same immediate ancestors in jade
and lacquer as the previous incense boxes [11,13].
Unlike the tiger, which was native to China (at least in some species)
and which had figured prominently among the motifs of Chinese art since
the Bronze Age 2 - with a white tiger emblematic of the west in Chinese
directional symbolism at least by Han times - the lion is a relative newcomer
to Chinese art, introduced from India during the Han dynasty as part of the
rich visual imagery that accompanied Buddhism. As the Buddhist church
became established, its Chinese followers had increasingly numerous
occasions to see representations of lions, since, in the Indian manner, a
pair of the noble beasts typically flanked the Buddha's throne - especially
in depictions of the Buddha Sakyamuni, the Lion of the Sakya Clan - and
since, according to the canons of Buddhist iconography, the lion was the

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