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
As the bronzes from Compton Verney reveal, we need to reassess the developments of Shang and Zhou bronzes with a new sensitivity to the possibilities of the variety of regional traditions that contributed to their extraordinary shapes and designs. New archaeological finds change our perspectives every day. Indeed, only in the past few years has another twist been added to the story. A bronze you (Fig. 9) excavated from a site of the 8th century BC in the village of Liangdaicun, near Hancheng in Shaanxi province, carries the same pronged horns seen on the Compton Verney you. Yet the jaws of the heads with pronged horns are rather blunt and the birds with hooked plumage lack the crisp casting of late Shang and early Zhou bronzes. This piece seems to be a remarkable example of a recreation of an ancient vessel made some 200 or more years later, after the fashion for pronged horns had died away. The you was found in a richly furnished tomb near the Yellow River that included a number of other copies of much more ancient bronzes.9 Such finds demonstrate that the bronzes that are collected today were even in those distant centuries revered and valued for the links with the past that they offered their owners. The drama of the forms and decoration valued now were also valued and even reproduced in the past.
Dame Jessica Rawson is Professor of Chinese Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford and Warden of Merton College.
For information on visiting Compton Verney, telephone + 44 [0] 1926 645500 or go to www.comptonverney.org.uk
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