344.
A PAIR OF POWDER-BLUE GROUND AND GILT-DECORATED VASES AND COVERS
Qing dynasty, Kangxi period, early 18th century
18,5 cm high each
Provenance: Naples, Villa della Floridiana, Museo Duca di Martina, Placido de Sangro (1829-1891) collection.
inv. nn. 3339, 3370.
Both the vases with a gilt decoration of some of the ‘Hundred Antiquities’ (bogu).
The technique of the powder-blue – known in Chinese as salan (“speckled blue”), xuehualan (“snow flakes blue”) or qingjinlan (“metallic blue”)- consists in applying the blue enamel blowing it on the surface of the unfired vessel through a bamboo tube. It originated in the Xuande period, reaching an unrivalled level of subtle refinement, but it was during the reign of Kangxi that it was fully developed, often in combination with gilt figurative motifs.
The technique was meticulously described by Pere d’Entrecolles in 1722, and it is also cited in the “Commemorative Stele on Ceramic Production” (Taocheng jishi bei ji) compiled in 1735 by Tang Ying. The talented director of the Jingedezhen Imperial kilns explained the process to create this glaze also in his text which accompanies one of the twenty paintings of the Court Version of the Twenty Illustrations of the Manufacture of Porcelain, commissioned by Qianlong himself in 1743 (P.Y.K. Lam, Qing Monochromes and Tang Yin, in A Millenium of Monochomes. From the Great Tang to the High Qing, exhibition catalogue (Geneva) edited by L. Schwartz-Arenales, Milan 2018, pp. 142-171, pp. 156, 168, and ill. III.9).
The term bogu, usually translated in English as “Hundred antiquities”, refers to a very popular decorative motif which includes an unspecified number of objects of various types (vases, books, censers, but also flowers, miniaturized trees, and so on), each characterized by a particular symbolism, most of them in some ways related to antiques.
This pattern came to be used during the Northern Song dynasty, and could be related to the spread of the collectionism of ancient pre-dynastic bronzes, favoured by literati and aristocrats, and among them in particular by emperor Huizong who in 1123 commissioned to Wang Fu an illustrated catalogue of his collection, the “Drawings and Lists of all the Antiquities stored in the Xuanhe Palace” (Chongxiu Xuanhe bogu tulu), a title which contain the same term bogu.
