Page 93 - China's Renaissance in Bronze, The Robert H.CIague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes 1100-1900

disappeared with the fall of the dynasty, the Ming officials charged with
responsibility for designing the thousands of bronzes commissioned by the
Xuande Emperor in 1428 did not have access to original Bronze Age vessels
as models; instead, they based their designs on representations of archaic
vessels in Song ceramics and in Song-dynasty woodblock-printed collection
catalogs. Through whimsy, misunderstanding, or circumstances now for-
gotten, reliance on such indirect sources occasionally resulted in fanciful
interpretations of the ancient forms, a phenomenon that might explain the
unusual appearance of the present censer.
With its deep bowl, vertically inclined walls, and flaring lip, the basic
form recalls a Shang or early Western Zhou yu, a food-serving vessel akin
to the gui but having a deep bowl with steeply pitched straight walls rather
than the gui's bulbous bowl with expanding and contracting profile. 2 On
3
rare occasions the yu may have legs, though, like the gui, it typically sits
atop a ring foot; in addition, the yu never has a platform base and it seldom
has vertically oriented handles.
The distinctive base derives not from the bronze tradition, but from
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the Song ceramic tradition. Narcissus-bulb bowls in imperial Ru and guan 5
ware, for example, have steeply inclined walls that spring from a similar, if
less exaggerated, platform-like base with rounded edges; the undersides
of such bases reveal a wide, unornamented ring that receives the legs and
that surrounds a broad, flat, slightly sunken, central well, exactly as in the
present censer. Despite such correspondences, Ru and guan bulb bowls
lack handles, have elliptical rather than circular bodies, have four cloud-
head feet rather than three cabriole legs, and have shallow bowls with
short sides rather than deep bowls with tall sides.
Popular in Zhou and Han times, cabriole legs support a variety of
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Bronze Age vessels. Antiquarian interests sparked the use of cabriole legs
in Song ceramics, especially for Ru, Ding, and guan ware censers modeled
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on ancient cylindrical-zun wine vessels. Though they could thus have been
drawn from either ancient bronzes or Song ceramics, the cabriole legs on
this censer likely came from the ceramic tradition, along with a base bor-
rowed from Ru or guan ware.
Dragon-form handles of the type on this censer have no precedent
among ancient bronzes, but their forebears grace Song-dynasty guan and
Longquan censers of gui shape. 8 Large and meticulously articulated, the
handles are considerably more elaborate than the abstract dragon-form
handles on Song ceramics. In interpretation, the formalized, square-snouted
kui dragons find parallels in the strapwork dragons that ornament the

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