Page 12 - Status & Ritual Chinese Archaic Bronzes

Lot 7 “X made this precious sacral vessel”. (The graph here noted as
“X” has not yet been identified; it might be either a personal
Lot 23 name or a clan symbol.) The identical inscription appears on
a gui food serving vessel in the Arthur M. Sackler Collections,
Lot 13 a reminder that bronze ritual vessels often were made in
sets and were used in ceremonies that required a prescribed
10 combination of vessels.

The longer inscriptions on commemorative vessels from the
Western Zhou period might record a victory in battle, for
example, or the bestowal of land or other benefaction by the
emperor; inscriptions on vessels so inscribed sometimes are
very long, occasionally numbering 100 or more characters.
As vessels came to serve everyday functions in royal and
aristocratic households during the Warring States period (475-
221 BC), inscriptions decrease in frequency just as sumptuous
surface decoration becomes more pronounced, often with
inlays of gold, silver, copper (lot 23), turquoise, and malachite.

The most important decorative motif on vessels from the
Shang and Western Zhou periods is the so-called taotie mask
(lots 4, 8, 12, 14, 18, 19, 21), which generally boasts a
ferocious feline-like face with large, C-shaped horns, bulging
eyes, and bared fangs that descend from the upper jaw. (By
contrast, the lower jaw is never represented.) The animal’s
body, if depicted, is shown in reduced scale and extends
laterally outward from the face. In Shang-dynasty vessels the
taotie mask generally can be read in two ways: that is, as a
single animal, its face presented frontally, its body bifurcated
and splayed out to either side; or, alternatively, it can be read
as two confronting animals, each seen in profile, their heads
butting. It is not known whether the “double entendre” was
intentional or accidental. By contrast, the masks of Western
Zhou vessels generally can be read in only one way. Subsidiary
registers of decoration feature small dragons, long-tailed
birds, and others (sometimes including such abstract features
as whorls, bosses, and ribs.) The decorative motifs often are
set against an intricate background of small, squared spirals
known as leiwen (lot 21), though in rare instances, as seen in
the superb zun wine vessel (lot 12), the mask may be presented
against an otherwise unembellished ground, its disconnected
elements sometimes termed a “dismembered taotie mask.”
It is likely that many, even all, of these motifs had meaning
for the people of Shang and Zhou; in the absence of written
records detailing possible meanings, however, we cannot