An exceptional and rare archaic bronze 'mythical beast' handle, Late Shang / Early Western Zhou dynasty | 商末 / 西周初 青銅獸耳

Sotheby's Hong Kong, 7th April 2014, lot 3639.

香港蘇富比2014年4月7日，編號3639

This extraordinary bronze sculpture is a fragmentary handle of what would originally have been a truly monumental ritual vessel, probably of 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.