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dominate the scene, as the ceramics are often featured as vases or fruit bowls. Figure 2

also shows an example of a Qing court painting measuring approximately 36 wide and 97

cm tall drawn in the Kangxi period around 1720, where the glaze crackles are clearly

depicted.

Besides the aforementioned bird-and-flower paintings, images specifically

portraying ceramic objects in visual media date primarily from the early years of the Qing

dynasty and onward. These images are categorized as the illustrated catalogues of

antiquities cherished by various emperors and are currently stored in the rare books and

manuscript collections of the Qing imperial archives at the National Palace Museum in

Taipei. They are themselves part of a long lineage of illustrated catalogues that began

primarily during the Song Dynasty, during which manuals and catalogues of bronze

objects emerged alongside the development of imperial court art collections such as the

Kaogu tu (1092), or Xuanhe bogu tulu (1123). With regard to ceramic objects, Qing

imperial collecting and cataloguing provided the context for ceramic pictorial catalogues.

Ceramic pictorial catalogues came varied in size, form, and content. One of the most

famous pictorial works is the Yongzheng period (1723-1735) handscroll painting entitled

13
Guwan tu (Scroll of Antiquities) dated to 1728. Painted with ink and colors on paper

by a painter of the Qing imperial painting academy, the grandiose Guwan tu measures

14
52.5 cm measures high, approximately 135 cm wide, and over twenty meters long. It is

a scroll whose graphic content comprises 223 assorted antique objects and can been read

as a magnified pictorial record of actual objects that constituted the Yongzheng court art

collection, tout court. In sum, the scroll includes a total of 103 ceramic objects whose