Offerings from the Bronze Age
Jessica Rawson introduces highlights from Sir Peter Moores’ remarkable collection of ancient Chinese bronzes at Compton Verney, and explains how our knowledge of these ritual vessels is being transformed by archaeological discoveries.
Jessica Rawson, Wednesday, 23rd April 2008
If we look at two more flamboyant bronzes, we can explore further this tension between the traditional pattern-making tendencies first developed by the Shang in the taotie and the attempts to incorporate images of realistic or semi-realistic creatures. One of these is a small jar- like vessel, known as a zhi (Fig. 6). The faces of the two main surfaces carry buffalo horns, jutting away from the sides, for here the taotie has been treated as if it was an ox or buffalo. This is typical of the early Zhou period in the decades after the defeat of the Shang in about 1045 bc. Two famous excavated vessels, the Bo Ju li (Fig. 4) and the Yu Bo gui (Fig. 5), carrying such buffalo horns are reliably dated by their Zhou-period inscriptions.3 They come from the two extremes ends of the Zhou state: the Bo Ju li from the far north-east, near present-day Beijing, and the Yu Bo gui from the most westerly borders of the realm, at present-day Baoji. Despite the distance between Beijing and Baoji of more than a thousand kilometres, these bronzes undoubtedly share an approach to the buffalo motifs. In addition to the buffalo horns on the animal faces on the principal surfaces of the bronzes, small, three-dimensional appendages are made in the shapes of animal heads, with a buffalo head as a knob on the lid of the Bo Ju li and surmounting the handles on the gui.
The second vessel at Compton Verney in this more flamboyant style is a further variant on the wine vessel, you (Fig. 7). Its most striking features are the large heads with pronged horns on the handle. A set of vessels in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also found at Baoji, has two you with related decoration, including not only the pronged animal heads but also the body surface of ribbing and bird motifs seen here.4 Like the buffalo-headed pieces, these bronzes were thought for some considerable time to be the product of the flamboyant choices of the Zhou and quite distinct from Shang taste.
However, archaeological finds have undermined this view. Vessels with animal heads with pronged horns have been found at Shang-period sites. But, most significant of all, as Li Yung-ti of the Academia Sinica, Taipei, has established in an important article, ceramic moulds for casting bronzes have been found with similar motifs at the principal late-Shang city site, Anyang.5 These moulds demonstrate that many of the features thought initially to be Zhou originated in the late Shang period, including animals with pronged horns, vertical ribbing and even the projecting beams seen on some pieces in this group, among them a you in the Freer Gallery, Washington, DC.6
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