Page 90 - China's Renaissance in Bronze, The Robert H.CIague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes 1100-1900

in three vertical columns of two characters each (six characters); and that
the calligraphy of the mark should be in either small-seal-script (xiaozhuan)
characters or standard-script (kaishu) characters in the powerful but balanced
style of the early Tang calligrapher Ouyang Xun (557-641). As in all genuine
marks on works from the Xuande period, the character de (second graph
in the name Xuande) should omit the horizontal stroke at its center - the
stroke that ordinarily appears between the 'four' and 'heart' elements in the
dictionary form of the character.
In content and calligraphic style, the mark on the Clague censer
answers to the above criteria - as, however, do the majority of Xuande marks,
genuine as well as spurious, since the general characteristics of such marks
are well known. Although the mark on this censer resembles those on
genuine Xuande-period porcelains 10 and those on several bronze censers
in the Palace Museum, Taipei, that have some claim to authenticity, 11 subtle
points of style distinguish it as an imitation, for example: in genuine marks,
the stroke that sweeps downward and to the right in the character da is
usually longer than the stroke that sweeps downward and to the left; in
the character ming, the vertical stroke at the left edge of the 'moon'
element usually projects further downward than the bottom of the hooked
vertical stroke at the right, and the 'sun' radical is typically smaller in
proportion to the character as a whole than in this example; in the character
xuan, the horizontal stroke between the 'roof' radical and the 'sun' element
is usually shorter than the top of the 'sun' element, and the character as a
whole is usually slightly more attenuated than is the case here. The differ-
ences are subtle indeed; just as this censer reflects the designer's familiarity
with Xuande bronzes, the mark reveals his acquaintance with Xuande marks.

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