Page 180 - Sotheby's NYC September 20 2022 Forging An Empire Bronzes

his extraordinary bronze sculpture is a fragmentary handle of what
would originally have been a truly monumental ritual vessel, probably
Tof gui form, undoubtedly made for a high ranking member of the
aristocracy in the late Shang or early Western Zhou dynasty. The decoration is
highly complex and can be interpreted in different ways, depending on the angle
viewed. A feline figure is depicted perched above a bold ferocious beast mask,
which appears to be ‘worn’ by a mythical creature with a scaly body and dragon-
scroll mane, whose head is concealed under the mask and arms outstretched
to hold it in place. When viewed from the bottom, the sculptural handle shows
a stylized elephant with a long coiling trunk and prominent tusks, devoured
from behind by the two half-human, half-feline figures. The present lot would
have belonged to a vessel that must have been ostentatiously decorated and
painstakingly constructed using the piece-mold technique, undoubtedly provoking
awe and reverence during its time. Even as a fragment, it is an outstanding legacy
of late Shang/early Western Zhou bronze craftsmanship.

Very few related bronze handles of this powerful sculptural form have been
recorded. Compare a larger handle in the form of a fierce dragon from the early
Western Zhou dynasty, unearthed in 1992 from Haijia village, Fufeng county,
Shaanxi province, now in the Fufeng County Museum, Baoji, published in Xu Tianjin,
ed., Jijin zhuguoshi zhouyuan chutu xizhou qingtongqi jingcui / Fine Western Zhou’s
Bronzes Unearthed from Zhouyuan, Beijing, 2002, pl. 36.

The style of casting, iconography and decoration of this fragment is also closely
related to the famous you vessel in the Musée Cernuschi, Paris, which has a
counterpart in the Sumitomo Collection, Japan. While the whole Cernuschi vessel
depicts a human being held in the open mouth of a feline figure, debatable whether
figure looks scared, the current fragment reveals a figure in similar pose, but with
its head inside the beast’s mouth. Other elements, such as the stylized elephantine,
serpentine and dragon motifs, and the dense scrolling ground, can be found on
both pieces. Where the current fragment shows a feline depicted peering between
the ears of the taotie mask, the Cernuschi vessel is cast with a cover surmounted
by a stylized goat-antelope, also depicted in similar posture. The Cernuschi vessel
is illustrated by Mary Tregear, Chinese Art, London, 1997, p. 32, where Gilles Béguin
notes that the vessel, purchased in 1920, reputedly came from Hunan, at the foot
of Mount Weishan, on the border between the Anhua and Ningxiang districts west
of Changsha. He argues that the zoomorphism of the you places it culturally in a
southern province, independent of the Shang Kingdom further north, part of the
totemic narratives that establish the origins of many aristocratic clans, bringing
together man and beast in a protective relationship. While the significance of
zoomorphic motifs on archaic bronzes is still contested by scholars, most agree
that sculptural animal motifs appear to be a characteristic of bronzes from the
south—a tantalizing clue to the origins of the present piece.