Page 132 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

must have been exceedingly rare, acquired in
diplomatic gifts from oriental rulers or, in a few
instances, brought back from the East by travelers
(Whitehouse 1973, 63-78).
The Gaignieres-Fonthill vase had certainly
reached Europe by 1381, when it was set in a now
lost silver gilt and enameled mount. From various
inscriptions, from heraldic evidence, and from the
style of the mount, the ewer can be dated 1381,
the year when it was given by the Hungarian
king, Louis the Great to Charles in of Anjou-
Sicily to celebrate the latter's accession to the
kingdom of Naples (1381). The bottle itself is
made of a hard, white qingbai (blue white, for-
merly known as yingqing) porcelain with a pale
bluish-green glaze and can be dated c. 1320-1340.
A drawing made for Roger de Gaignieres in 1713
represents the bottle when it was still mounted as
a ewer (Bibliotheque Nationale, MS fr. 20070, fol.
8). Four manuscript pages bound with the draw-
ing describe its mounting at the time, when it was
in the collection of M. de Caumartin. It had pre-
viously belonged to the dauphin and was recorded
in a royal inventory of 1689. The ewer, which
later came into the possession of William Beck-
ford at Fonthill Abbey, was sold in 1822 to John
Farquhar and resold by him a year later. When
it reappeared in the Hamilton Palace sale in 1882,
it had been stripped of its fourteenth-century
mount to become again a simple "pear-shaped
bottle"; today only the hole pierced for the spout
testifies to the European additions. J.M.M.
later Deccani depictions of elephants, suggesting most beautiful vessels and plates of porcelain,
strongly that it should be assigned to one of the large and small, that one could describe are made
sultanates of the Deccan, perhaps to the Bahmanid in great quantity... in a city which is called
dynasty that ruled from 1345 until the first quar- Tingiu [Tongan near Quanzhou], more beautiful
ter of the sixteenth century. than can be found in any other city. And... from
s.c.w. there they are carried to many places throughout
the world. And there is plenty there and a great
(Adapted with permission from India: Art and Culture, sale, so great that for one Venetian groat you
published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New would actually have three bowls so beautiful that
York, 1985.) none would know how to devise them better
(Moule and Pelliot 1938 1:352 [chap. 157]; Pelliot
1959-1973,2:805-812).
In the Islamic world, porcelain was first described
15
by Sulayman, an Arabian traveler of the ninth
GAIGNIERES-FONTHILL VASE century, and recent excavations in Siraf have
revealed that large quantities of porcelain were
c. 1320-1340 reaching the Persian Gulf before 820. Rulers like
bluish-white glazed Yuan-dynasty porcelain Harun al-Rashid (786-806) in Baghdad and the
height 28.3 (nVs) Fatimid caliph al-Mustansir (1036-1094) had large
references: Mazerolle 1897; Moule and Pelliot 1938, collections of Chinese porcelains. Chinese silks, as
1:352; Pelliot 1959-1973, 2:805-812; Lane 1961; well as other Chinese objects, had already found
Whitehouse 1973, 63-78; Spallanzani 1978, 83;
Lunsingh Scheurleer 1980, 4-5, figs, la, ib; Ayers their way to Europe as early as the Roman period.
1985, 260-261 The oldest reference to actual examples of porce-
lain in a European collection seems to occur in
National Museum of Ireland, Dublin 1323 in the will of Queen Maria of Naples and
Sicily, but material from an archaeological excava-
In his Description of the World written in 1298- tion of the royal residence in Lucera in Puglie
1299, Marco Polo provided the first substantial provides an indication that Chinese porcelain
account of Chinese porcelain to reach the Euro- reached Europe before the fourteenth century.
pean educated public: "And... I tell you that the The evidence suggests, however, that porcelain

EUROPE AND THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD 1^1