433.
A CLOISONNÉ ENAMEL MOONFLASK, BIANHU
Ming dynasty, 17th century
26,3 cm high
Provenance: Naples, Villa della Floridiana, Museo Duca di Martina, Placido de Sangro (1829-1891) collection.
inv. n. 5235.
Supported by a short oval foot, the flattened globular body raising to a tall cylindrical neck, two shaped handles set between the shoulder and the neck, the external surface of the two larger sides decorated in polychrome enamels on a rich turquoise ground with flowers, peaches and pomegranates, the shorter sides with butterflies.
The form of this flask directly derives from porcelain flasks of the early fifteenth century. The origin of this shape can be found in those North African pottery containers known as ‘St. Menas flasks’. Around the fifth-seventh century they were used by Christian pilgrims to hold oil or holy water collected from north-west of Egypt where they went to give homage to St. Menas. The ‘St. Menas flasks’ circulated in large quantities not only in Europe and in the Near East (W. Anderson, Menas Flasks in the West. Pilgrimage and Trade at the End of Antiquity, in “Ancient West & East”, 6, 2007, pp. 221-243), but probably reached also China – where they begun to be reproduced from the early Tang dynasty – thanks to the intermediation of the Sogdian merchants.
Peaches (taozi) and pomegranates (shiliu) which appear on this flask are respectively symbols of longevity and fertility, the first associated with Xiwangmu, the Queen Mother of the West, and Shoulao, the God of Longevity, both deities belonging to the Daoist pantheon, the second with the homophonic word shi which means “generations”. When pomegranates are associated with butterflies (die) as in this flask, they form a rebus which is a blessing with a “repeated” (die) descendants.
A very similar pilgrim flask with an apocryphal Jingtai mark is in the Brooklyn Museum in New York (inv. 09.657, Gift of Samuel P. Avery:
J. Gets, Catalogue of the Avery Collection of Ancient Chinese Cloisonnés, New York 1912.
, pl. 47). Another comparable example is in the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Liverpool (inv. LL 5950: R. L. Hobson, Chinese Porcelain and Wedgwood Pottery with Other Works of Ceramic Art, London 1928, n. 851); see also C. Brown, Cloisonné. The Clague Collection, Phoenix 1980, p. 58, pl. 21, and H. Brinker – A. Lutz, Chinesisches Cloisonné. Die Sammlung Pierre Uldry, Zürich 1985, nn. 136, 138.
