From the Exhibition:
Design by the Book: Chinese Ritual Objects and the Sanli tu
This vessel, with its vibrant blue
glaze and mountain design, is one of the few known so-called mountain jars.
Mountain jars of different types are recorded in the ancient Confucian ritual
classics as having been used in royal ancestral sacrifices as well as in
sacrifices to Earth. By the Ming era (1368–1644), mountain jars were also
employed in the grand imperial Sacrifice to Heaven. Both the blue glaze and the
design of the present vessel indicate that it was likely used at the new Altar
of Heaven in Beijing, built by the Jiajing emperor (r. 1521–1567) after 1530, according
to instructions detailed in the Collected
Statutes of the Ming (1587). The jar bears a raised decoration left
unglazed that may originally have been gilded. Its main design of three
mountain peaks, framed between two horizontal bands, appears on the front and
back. Images of mountains have been the identifying design feature of this type
of ritual vessel since at least the Tang dynasty (618–907). The early examples are
decorated with a naturalistic mountain scene in the landscape mode, with
superimposed rock formations vanishing in the distance as depicted in the Sanli tu (fig. 1), whereas the mountains
on the Jiajing jar are more stylized and nearly symmetrical. This simplified linear
mode of representation harks back to a particular pictorial tradition that
evokes the pictographic dimension of Chinese writing. A bronze mirror dating to
the Tang dynasty (618–907) shows a design of the Five Sacred Peaks, four
arranged around the rim, and a fifth represented by the central knob (fig. 2).
The Five Sacred Peaks are real mountains in China that correspond to the four
cardinal directions and their center, forming a sacred cosmography. On the
mirror, each of the mountains is represented with two minor peaks flanking a
main central peak, much like the graphic form of the character for mountain, shan 山. In this schematic
depiction, no attempt is made to distinguish the topographical specificities of
each mountain.
During
the Ming period, mountain representations were disseminated in printed books such
as the Hainei qiguan (1609), an
illustrated travelogue written by Yang Erzeng (active first half of the
seventeenth century), drawing from a number of preexisting works (fig. 3). The
raised decoration on the mountain jar is closely related to the depiction of
the vertical, craggy peaks of Mount Huang in the Hainei qiguan but is simplified, using fewer lines. Increasingly
abstract mountain designs are also manifest in the decorative arts of the
period, for instance, in objects made for scholars. The back of a porcelain
brush rest from the Percival David Foundation shows a design of five
overlapping mountain peaks, possibly alluding to the Five Sacred Peaks, with a
cobalt-blue and copper-red underglaze (fig. 4). The three-dimensionality of the
mountains is conveyed by their arrangement along the curved surface of the
object, as well as by the layering of thinly cut porcelain sheets to give a
sense of depth. But these layers, far from lending an impression of naturalism
to the mountain peaks, instead highlight the linearity and regularity of the
design.
This
more triangular mode of representing mountain peaks is also seen on large
sculpted marble rocks at the Altar of Heaven complex in Beijing. Located in the
northeast of the compound are eight stones sculpted to resemble stylized
mountain peaks (fig. 5). A plaque at the site notes that seven of them date to
the Jiajing period, while an eighth was added during the Qianlong reign (1736–1796),
but the information is difficult to verify. The original seven sculptures are
known today as the Seven Star Stones (qi
xing shi 七星石), an appellation that refers to the seven stars of the
Northern Dipper, an important constellation in both Chinese visual culture as
well as Daoist practice. It is possible that this connection was known in the Ming era as well: both the Hainei qiguan and a Jiajing period gazetteer explain that local mountain peaks were called “Seven Star Stones” because of their resemblance to the Northern Dipper. The Jiajing emperor was
known to have inclinations toward popular Daoism and inner alchemy, but without
further research it is impossible to ascertain whether the marble stones were
even laid at the Altar of Heaven under his rule, or what purpose they served.
This mode of representing mountains and peaks is all the more striking when
compared with garden or scholar’s rocks, which embody a more naturalistic
attitude toward geological formations. Always asymmetrical, they speak more to
the wonder of the natural world than to human intervention, whereas the peaks
depicted on the jar and in prints tend to depict mountains that are well ordered
and more symmetrically structured.
The
design on the mountain jar is therefore likely derived from contemporary
woodblock prints but also draws on archaistic representations of mountains.
Other abstract mountain forms of the period, such as those of the brush rest or
the marble mountains, seem related to this alternative system of representation
that departs from naturalism to favor more simplified and iconic depictions of
mountain formations.
Lin Li-Chiang, “A Study of the Xinjuan Hainei Qiguan, a Ming Dynasty Book of Famous Sites,” in Bridges to Heaven: Essays on East Asian Art in Honor of Professor Wen C. Fong, ed. Jerome Silbergeld, Dora C. Y. Ching, Judith G. Smith, and Alfreda Murck (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011), 2:779–812.
Shih-shan Susan Huang, Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 38–52.
One refers to the Seven Star Stones near Shuangqing village, Hunan Province; the other, to a namesake located in Chaoyang Prefecture, Guangdong Province. Yang Erzeng, Hainei Qiguan 海内奇觀, Ming Wanli yibai tang keben 明萬曆夷白堂刻本 , juan 4, p. 46; Chaozhou fuzhi 潮州府志 (1547), juan 1, p. 13.
