Page 94 - Sotheby's NYC September 21 2022 Important Chinese Art

This dazzling and lavish crown is distinguished by its
complex, sculptural form and extraordinarily fine openwork.
The striking silhouette is created by overlapping thinly
hammered, ruyi-shaped gilt-silver plates of various heights.
The intricate coin designs were sensitively and painstakingly
cut out from the metal sheets. The finial, in the form of a
phoenix spreading its wings up high, is also uncommon. This
crown is a testimony of the technical perfection achieved in
gilt metalwork during the Liao dynasty (907-1125).
See two closely related Liao dynasty crowns of similar
sculptural form and delicate openwork, one in the
Mengdiexuan Collection, exhibited in Adornment for the
Body and Soul: Ancient Chinese Ornaments from the
Mengdiexuan Collection, University Museum and Art Gallery,
The University of Hong Kong, 1999, cat. no. 92, the other
in the Gansu Provincial Museum, Lanzhou, illustrated in
Jia Xizeng, ‘Liao dai jin guan [Liao Dynasty Gilt Crowns]’,
Zijincheng, November 2011, fig. 3-2. Similar to the present
lot, both crowns are topped in the center with finials in the
form of a phoenix spreading its wings. Compare also two in
the Inner Mongolia Museum, Hohhot, similarly structured
with overlapping cloud-shaped openwork plates but lacking
phoenix finials, illustrated in ibid., figs 3-4 and 3-5. As Jia
suggests, during the Liao dynasty, these crowns were solely
reserved for the court and the royal family during important
ritual rites, ceremonies and funerary practices, attesting to
the historical importance of these elaborate headdresses
(see ibid., pp 96-113).
For further related examples, compare a pair of gilt-silver
crowns excavated in 1986 from the tomb of the Princess
and Prince Consort of the State of Chen (c. 1018), now in
the Research Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology of
Inner Mongolia, Hohhot, and illustrated in Zhang Jingming,
Zhongguo beifang caoyuan gudai jinyin qi / The Ancient
Gold and Silver Wares from the Northern Steppe of China,
Beijing, 2005, pls 121-2. One crown, mounted with twenty-two
individual small roundels of phoenixes, birds, parrots and
flames on cloud-shaped metal sheets, was placed next to the
Prince Consort. Compare also another pair of headdresses in
the Musée Cernuschi, Paris (accession nos M.C. 2001-8 and
M.C. 2001-5), one of related form to the present piece and
constructed by combining scallop-edged openwork panels.
The dating of this lot is consistent with the results of
Laboratoires Serma microanalyses test no. SE 70-OA.

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