Chinese Ritual Bronzes: The Sacred Vessels of the Shang and Zhou
Between approximately 1600 and 221 BCE, the bronze-casting civilizations of ancient China produced a body of ritual metalwork that has never been equaled for technical sophistication, formal invention, or sustained symbolic complexity. The great bronze vessels of the Shang and Zhou dynasties — the ding (tripod cauldrons), the gui (food containers), the zun (wine vessels), the lei (wine storage vessels), the jue (libation cups) — were not luxury objects in any ordinary sense. They were the instruments through which the living maintained communication with the ancestral dead: filled with food and wine, placed in temple and tomb, inscribed with dedicatory texts recording the achievements of the ruler who commissioned them, they constituted the primary technology of royal ritual. The taotie mask — the devouring face that stares from the surface of virtually every major Shang bronze, its eyes prominent, its body dissolved into flanking dragons and birds — is one of the most debated images i...