A RARE AND FINELY CAST GILT-BRONZE MOUNTED COWRIE SHELL STAG MAT WEIGHT

Estimated Value:

8.000 € - 12.000 €

Schätzpreis:

28.000 €

Description:

China, Han dynasty
L. 9,2 cm
The full rounded shell of oval section dappled with reddish-brown on the ivory coloured ground forming the body of the beast, mounted around the sides and underneath in one continuous piece of gilt-bronze, the head held back with the branching antlers and ears pressed against the body and the four legs terminating in cloven hooves folded underneath.
Important Austrian private collection, bought in 1994 from E. & J. Frankel, New York
Published: Sotheby's London, 7.12.1993, lot 29 - Zeileis 'From Shang to Qing - Three and a Half Millennia of Chinese Bronze', 1999, no. 142, p. 352
Mat weights are believed to have been made in sets of four, such as the set of four gilt-bronze and cowrie shell tortoise-form weights found in pairs in each of two coffins in a double burial in a Western Han tomb in Hunyan, Shanxi province. See Wenwu, 1980:6, p. 51, fig. 27 (one of four). These weights were filled with lead to give them additional weight. For a set of four weights similar to the pair in the Falk collection see Kaikodo Journal, Autumn 1998, no. 46, pp. 128 and 226, where the Falk pair is illustrated p. 128, fig. 1. The entry for the set of four notes that the word for deer, lu, is a homonym for wealth, and that cowrie shells, since ancient times, had been used as currency. Also, the brown spots of the cowrie shell may be seen to allude to the sacred spotted deer which ferrets out lingzhi, the fungus of immortality.
Compare, also, the pair of similar stag-form mounts (minus the cowrie shell body) from the collection of Carl Kempe illustrated by O. Karlbeck, 'Selected Objects from Ancient Shou-Chou', B.M.F.E.A., Stockholm, 1955, No. 27, pl. 45, fig. 4 (a&b).
Very minor wear, small hole in shell

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