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A GILT BRONZE ‘DRAGON HEAD’ CHARIOT TERMINAL, HAN DYNASTY
奥地利
2024年10月18日 开拍
拍品描述
A GILT BRONZE ‘DRAGON HEAD’ CHARIOT TERMINAL, HAN DYNASTY

China, 206 BC-220 AD. Finely cast, the cylindrical shaft terminating in a dragon's head with bulging eyes, pierced mouth, a long upturned snout, laid back ears, and curved horns.

Provenance: From the private collection of Alan and Simone Hartman, New York. The underside with an old label from Rare Art inscribed ‘A34’. Alan Hartman (1930-2023) was an influential American art dealer, who took over his parents’ antique business in Manhattan and established the legendary Rare Art Gallery on Madison Avenue, with further locations in Dallas and Palm Beach. His wife Simone (née Horowitz) already served as assistant manager of the New York gallery before the couple married in 1975, and together they built a renowned collection for over half a century and became noted art patrons, enriching the collections of important museums including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (which opened the Alan and Simone Hartman Galleries in 2013) as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Brooklyn Museum in New York. Alan Hartman has been described as the greatest antiques dealer of our generation, and was widely recognized as a world authority in Chinese jade, bronzes, and Asian works of art.
Condition: Very good condition with ancient wear, signs of weathering and erosion, tiny nicks, light scratches, wear to gilt. The bronze with a rich, naturally grown patina with scattered cuprite and malachite encrustations.

Weight: 68.6 g
Dimensions: Length 7.6 cm

Mounted on an associated metal and velvet stand from the Hartmans’ Rare Art Gallery. (2)

Known as ‘terminals’ in English, fittings of this type are usually termed yue in Chinese, though they are sometimes also called wushi. This terminal originally capped and concealed the outer end of the wooden draught pole yuan of a horse-drawn chariot chema. The yoke, placed over the horses’ front shoulders, would have been hitched to a horizontal crossbar, which was in turn attached to the draught pole, the ensemble transmitting the horses’ forward movement to the chariot itself. A viewer facing the horses could have seen this bronze terminal between the horses, more or less at the level of the tops of their forelegs, depending upon the height and possible curvature of the draught pole.

Though Chinese tradition asserts that the chariot was invented during the Xia dynasty (possibly 2070 BC–possibly 1600 BC), the horse-drawn chariot is believed to have been introduced in China in the thirteenth century BC, during the Shang dynasty (c. 1600 BC–c. 1046 BC). From the Shang through the Warring States periods, chariots were typically two-wheeled vehicles drawn by two or four horses harnessed to a single draught pole. The chariot initially was a vehicle for hunting and for projecting status, its military role apparently limited to serving as an elevated, mobile command platform, with no evidence that it was used in battle in significant numbers. After the Zhou conquest of the Shang in c. 1046 BC, however, use of the chariot in warfare became much more widespread; in fact, use of war chariots may have played a decisive role in the Zhou overthrow of the Shang.

Among the most powerful emblems in Chinese art and culture, the dragon, or long in Chinese, traditionally symbolized auspicious powers, particularly control over water, including not only rivers, lakes, and oceans, but rainfall, hurricanes, and floods as well. In the early, dualistic view of the world that Daoism would espouse, the dragon came to represent the yang, or male forces of the universe, while its counterpart, the phoenix, or fenghuang, came to stand for the yin, or female forces. In due course, the dragon was adopted as the symbol of the emperor, as the personification of yang forces, just as the phoenix was appropriated as the symbol of the empress, as the embodiment of yin forces.

Literature comparison:
Compare a closely related gilt-bronze chariot pole fitting, with similar snout, eyes, ears, horns, and suspension hole, unearthed from Tomb 1, Dayun Mountain, Xuyi County, Jiangsu Province, exhibited by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, Tomb Treasures: New Discoveries from China's Han Dynasty, 17 February-28 May 2017.

Auction result comparison:
Type: Closely related
Auction: Sotheby’s London, 13 May 2009, lot 56
Price: GBP 7,500 or approx. EUR 13,000 converted and adjusted for inflation at the time of writing
Description: A gilt-bronze 'dragon head' fitting, Han dynasty
Expert remark: Compare the closely related form, modeling, manner of casting, and gilding. Note the larger size (14 cm).

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拍品估价:500 - 1,000 欧元 起拍价格:500 欧元  买家佣金:

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