A BRONZE RITUAL WINE VESSEL AND COVER, YOU
A BRONZE RITUAL WINE VESSEL AND COVER, YOU
A BRONZE RITUAL WINE VESSEL AND COVER, YOU
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A BRONZE RITUAL WINE VESSEL AND COVER, YOU

SHANG DYNASTY, 11TH CENTURY BC

Details
A BRONZE RITUAL WINE VESSEL AND COVER, YOU
SHANG DYNASTY, 11TH CENTURY BC
The pear-shaped body is raised on a spreading foot encircled by two bowstring bands and cast with two small taotie masks on either side of the body, which is reserved on a band of diagonally arranged leiwen set betweeen two narrow bands of bosses and interrupted by two loops attached to the rope-twist handle. The cover is similarly decorated beneath a segmented finial cast with cicadas. Both the interior of the vessel and the cover are cast with a three-character inscription.
11 5/8 in. (29.5 cm.) high, wood stand, two Japanese wood boxes
Provenance
Yamanaka & Co., Japan
A Japanese private collection, acquired in the 1930s
Exhibited
Grand Exhibition of Ancient Chinese and Corean Works of Art, Yamanaka & Co., Tokyo, 1934, fig. 36

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Lot Essay

The three-character inscription in the cover reads zuo ce Ci (made for Registrar Ci). Ce was an official title equivalent to a registrar and Ci is probably a personal name.

A you of similar form and with similar rope-twist handle and lozenge-pattern band was excavated in 1984 from tomb 269 in Qijia Village, East, Anyang, Henan province, and is illustrated in Zhongguo Qingtongqi Quanji - 3 - Shang(3), Beijing, 1997, p. 126, no. 125. See, also, the similar you illustrated by R. W. Bagley, Shang Ritual Bronzes in the Arthur M. Sackler Collections, Washington D.C. and Cambridge, 1987, p. 388, no. 68, where another similar example from Henan Hui Xian, is illustrated, p. 392, fig. 68.5. The author refers to the lozenge pattern cast on these vessels as being common to the late Anyang period, and proposes that it may have evolved from early Anyang designs of scorpions, such as those seen on a bronze hu in the Museum fur Ostasiatische Kunst, Koln, which the author illustrates on p. 390, fig. 68.1.

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