Page 186 - Christies Fine Chinese Works of Art March 2016 New York

EARLY POTTERY FIGURES FROM AN
IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION (LOTS 1473-1487)
Almost unknown outside China before the late nineteenth century, Chinese
pottery sculptures came to world attention over the course of the twentieth
century. Now, virtually everyone recognizes Tang horses and camels, not to
mention, the life-sized terracotta warriors from the trenches surrounding
the tomb of Qin Shihuangdi (r. 221–210 BC), the frst emperor of the Qin
dynasty (221–206 BC). Most collectors of Chinese pottery sculptures have
specialized in the brilliantly colored sancai, or “three-color”, glazed examples animals. By the sixth century, not only had the range of subject matter
from the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907). By contrast, this collection embodies
a much more comprehensive view, including examples from the Han (206
BC–AD 220) through the Tang dynasties, the works thus spanning nearly a
millennium.
The collection is especially strong in sixth- and seventh-century sculptures,
fascinating and compelling works that commanded only limited admiration
from previous generations of collectors, who prized eighth-century glazed
fgures above all others. Avoiding the road already well traveled, this
collection focuses on unglazed pieces that were embellished after fring
with mineral pigments, a technique known as “cold painting”, though
the collection includes distinguished glazed pieces as well. In fact, many
believe that unglazed sculptures, lacking brilliant colors, are the best
vehicles for conveying the power of pure sculptural form; in addition, cold-
painted ceramic sculptures also best refect the sculptors’ achievements in
naturalistic description, as the artists were better able to capture realistic
details with the broad palette of mineral colors than with the limited palette
of bright colors aforded by the glazed tradition. In fact, many scholars
believe that people of the Tang dynasty likely prized unglazed, cold-painted
sculptures over the colorful, sancai-glazed ones, as they better express the
goal of idealized naturalism than do the bright and often arbitrarily colored
sancai-glazed sculptures; moreover, it is only the cold-painted sculptures,
never the sancai-glazed ones, that occasionally bear original traces of gold-
leaf embellishment.
From earliest times, the reasons for creating funerary vessels and sculptures
were four: to provide food, water, and wine to sustain the spirit of the
deceased in the next life; to provide a variety of humans and animals to
serve, entertain, and amuse the spirit of the deceased; to provide guardians
to protect the spirit of the deceased on its journey to the next world; and to
provide a suficiently great quantity of food, sculptures, and luxury goods
to establish beyond all doubt the wealth, importance, and elevated status
of the deceased—whatever his or her actual status in the temporal world
might have been—so that he or she would not only repose in glory but
be appropriately received in the next world. During the Neolithic period,
provisioning with food and drink seems to have been of paramount concern,
and hence vessels of various shapes and functions were primary. By the
Shang dynasty (c. 16th century–c. 1050 BC), however, the other functions
were rapidly ascending in importance. With its thousands of life-sized
horses and armor-clad warriors, Qin Shihuangdi’s so-called terracotta army,
discovered near present-day Xi’an, in Shaanxi province, refects an early
preoccupation both with protecting the spirit of the deceased from demons
and evil spirits and with demonstrating the late emperor’s wealth and
projecting his military might.
Already in Neolithic times, the spirit of the deceased had been provisioned
with vessels flled with grain, water, and wine. By the Shang and Zhou (c.
1050 BC–221 BC) dynasties, elaborate ceremonies had evolved that required
the use of jade implements and bronze ritual vessels. Shang ceremonies
sometimes involved human and animal sacrifces as well, the animals
including elephants, rhinoceroses, horses, oxen, pigs, and dogs, among
many others. Sculptures carved in wood were used in the south during the
Warring States period (481–221 BC), perhaps as substitutes for the sacrifcial
victims of earlier times. Used in the north in the ffth and sixth centuries
BC, if only infrequently, pottery sculptures of fred ceramic ware became a
standard feature in the north in the late third century BC. That date marks
the beginning of a long, continuous tradition of provisioning the spirits of
the deceased with sculptures, a tradition that would persist into the Tang
dynasty, through the eighth century and well into the ninth.
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The earliest such ceramic sculptures produced in any quantity—those of the
Qin and Han dynasties—represent warriors and horses. Intended to protect
from demons and evil spirits while at the same time symbolizing the wealth,
political power, and military might of the deceased, they depict ethnically
Chinese fgures in native attire. The repertory of subjects expanded during
the Han dynasty to include court attendants, entertainers, and barnyard
expanded further still but came to refect infuences from India, Persia, and
Central Asia that reached China via trade over the fabled Silk Route. Those
infuences manifest themselves most forcefully in the foreign faces and
clothing styles of the guardians, merchants, and grooms represented—a
cosmopolitanism that culminated in the exceptionally naturalistic sculptures
from the Tang dynasty.
During the Tang dynasty, China was the undisputed leader of the world,
her capital, Chang’an (present-day Xi’an), the world’s largest, richest, most
cosmopolitan city. As a wealthy, sophisticated metropolis and as the eastern
terminus of the Silk Route—even if numerous foreign goods, including luxury
items, did fnd their way farther eastward to Korea and Japan—Chang’an
was a magnet for a multitude of non-Chinese visitors, traders, and religious
mendicants. Chang’an had not only great Buddhist temples and monasteries
but sizable communities of Muslims, Jews, and Nestorian Christians as well,
adding to the religious and intellectual fervor of the day.
The earliest sculptures in this collection date to the Han dynasty, likely to
the Western Han period (206 BC–AD 9). Such sculptures typically represent
oficials, attendants (lot 1474), entertainers, and dancers (lot 1473) as well as
horses and a few other animals. Not intended to be seen individually, these
pottery sculptures—indeed those of all periods—were conceived as sets that
might include just a few fgures or hundreds, even many hundreds, of fgures,
depending upon the wealth and status of the deceased. Created in molds,
such sculptures were are of gray earthenware, a low-fring ceramic ware that
generally matures in the range of 800° to 900° Celsius. The sculptures show
restrained elegance, their surfaces smooth, their lines fowing; the fgures’
masklike faces are similar from one fgure to the next, and their robes, which
often fare outward at the bottom, typically have long, wide sleeves. From the
Han through the Tang dynasties, fgures who are neither gesturing or holding
an object typically hold their arms before their chest and conceal their hands
within their generous sleeves (lots 1474, 1484, 1485). Only rare Han-dynasty
sculptures retain any pigment today (lot 1473), but at the time they were
made most were embellished after fring with colorful designs painted in
mineral pigments (i.e., so-called cold painting). Such sculptures were typically
covered with a coating of white pigment which smoothed the surfaces and
provided the perfect ground against which to showcase the reds, blacks,
ochres, greens, blues, and other mineral colors.
During the Six Dynasties period (AD 220–581), and particularly during the
Northern Wei dynasty (AD 386–534), ceramic sculptures became more
elaborate, soldiers wearing armor and holding swords (lot 1476), oxen
outftted with harnesses (lot 1477), the harnesses even embellished with
bosses, and horses sporting bridles, tassels, and blanket-covered saddles (lot
lot 1475). Ceramic sculptures from the Northern Wei period, which typically
date to the frst third of the sixth century, often appear slightly mannered,
the human fgures subtly elongated (lot 1476), the horses with heads that are
small in proportion to their bodies (lot 1475). Still crafted in gray earthenware,
many of the sculptures retain at least some pigment (lot 1477, 1479),
typically red, which was applied directly to the gray body rather than over an
underlying white ground. From the Northern Wei onward, ceramic sculptures
often were integrally fred on a square or rectangular plinth, or base, which
imparted stability to the generally upright, vertical fgures (lot 1475, 1479).