A FINE GILT-BRONZE 'BEAR AND TIGER' WEIGHT

Estimated Value:

1.500 € - 2.500 €

Schätzpreis:

2.600 €

Description:

China, Han dynasty
D. 6,3 cm
The tiger has thrown a bear to the ground and is biting into its belly. Details are extremely finely chiseled into the finished casting and are further highlighted by the preserved gilding. Weights to weigh down spread scrolls or scroll images were very popular in the Han period, but such finely executed examples are not often found.
Important Austrian private collection, acquired in the 1990s
Publ. Zeileis: 'From Shang to Qing - Three and a Half Millennia of Chinese Bronze', 1999, no. 143, p. 353
Cf. an almost identical comparative piece in gilt bronze in the Hotung Collection, no. 190, a similar one in jade is published: J.Rawson, Chinese Jades, London 1995, p.361 - A closely related gold and silver-inlaid bronze weight, cast with a tiger and a boar, is in the collection of the British Museum, accession no. 1982,0402.1, where Jessica Rawson notes that the life and death struggle of the two animals is very different from the static, almost timeless, stance of creatures depicted on early bronzes and that animals in combat were favourite subjects in the Near East and among China's nomadic neighbours, such as the peoples whose lords were buried in the frozen tombs of Pazyryk in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia. It is probable that nomadic woodwork, textiles and bronze were known to the Chinese, who adapted similar scenes from them for the inlaid bronzes
Wear, traces of age

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