The Villa Floridiana is a wonderful complex on the hills of Naples. It was owned by Ferdinand I of Bourbon, king of Two Sicilies (1751-1825), who acquired that land with its fantastic view on the gulf to erect a residence for his morganatic wife, Lucia Migliaccio duchess of Floridia (1770-1826). The harmonious Neoclassical building and the Romantic-style park were projected by the architect Antonio Niccolini (1772-1850) between 1817 and 1819.
Lucia Migliaccio in a portrait of the early 19th century.
One century later, in 1919, the Villa was acquired by the Italian government with the explicit project of transforming it in a museum where to store and show to the public the exceptional art collection gathered by Placido de Sangro, Duke of Martina (1829-1891).
Born in Naples in one of the noblest family of the city, Placido de Sangro was the son of Riccardo de Sangro (1803-1861), who actively partecipated to the Siege of Gaeta, the last attempt by the army of the Reign of Two Sicilies to contrast the Savoy troops in their inexorable reunification of the Italian peninsula which was completed in 1861.
After the defeat and the death of his father, Placido prudently decided to leave Naples for Paris where he had initially a residence in Faubourg Saint Honoré.
At that time, the French capital was an effervescent place from the point of view of the collectionism of art. This depended obviously by the outstanding artistic tradition of that country but also by some recent events, such as the organization of the second Universal Exhibition in 1855 and the similar greater event of 1867. Everybody who had a passion for art and together a certain availability of economic resources, could satisfy his desires in any field of artistic production. Thanks to the intense activity of auction houses and antique dealers, the Parisian market could offer a wide range of art objects, including Chinese and Japanese items.
Placido de Sangro in a portrait of the late 19th century.
The origin of the collectionism of Asian art in France could be traced back already to the seventeenth century, thanks to personages such as the cardinal Richelieu, Pierre Séguier and above all Louis XIV who owned a huge collection of Chinese porcelain and works of art, some of them received as gift from the Siamese ambassadors who visited Paris in 1688 and some others presented by the Kangxi emperor through the intemerdiation of the Jesuit priest Père Jean de Fontenay. [N. Monnet, Le jeune duc du Maine, protecteur des premiéres missions françaises en Chine, in La Chine à Versailles. Art et diplomatie au XVIIIe siècle, exhibition catalogue edited by M.-L. De Rochebrune, Versailles 2014, pp. 40-42].
The Sun King strongly promoted the taste for China, chartering the French East India Company from 1664, acquiring original Chinese items and commissioning to local artists works evidently inspired by the artefacts of those far lands, such as the legendary Trianon de porcelaine, a building in the park of Versailles which perfectly epitomizes the spread of the Chinoiserie fashion in France and Europe. Even if the sovereign at a certain point banished Chinese porcelain from the Royal apartments as a sign of austerity and to support the local manufacturing, his son, the Great Dauphin, and his nephew, the duc d’Orleans, displays large quantities of Chinese porcelain in their residences. [S. Castelluccio, Collecting Chinese and Japanese Porcelain in Pre-revolutionary Paris, Los Angeles 2013, p. 46]
The French connection with Chinese art collectionism reached a renovated apex towards the mid nineteenth century. In 1863 the Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, inaugurated her spectacular musée Chinois in the Fontainebleau Castle, in which she displayed mainly objects coming from the 1860’s sack of the imperial Yuanming Yuan residence near Beijing, together with the gifts of the Siamese embassy that had reached Paris in 1861, an event immortalized in a large canvas by the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme now in Versailles. [A. McQueen, Empress Eugénie and the Arts. Politics and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century, Farnham 2011, pp. 228-235]
Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Empress Eugenie receives the Siamese embassy, 1861. Versailles.
The founding of the Empress Eugénie’s musée Chinois certainly inspired a new wave of Chinese art collectionism in France, exactly in the same period Placido de Sangro moved to Paris. However, the seventh decade of the nineteenth century, when the duke acquired an important part of his collection, was still an auroral phase of Chinese art collecting in Europe and in Paris, if we consider that the origin of important nuclei such as those formed by Ernest Grandidier and Enrico Cernuschi were founded only in the following decade.
We don’t know if the Duke of Martina was already acquainted with Far Eastern art before he left Naples. As a member of a noble dynasty, it is very likely he at least had some knowledge about Chinese export porcelain because, at that time, almost all the European families owned examples of that tableware.
Even if it never had a direct trade with East Asia, already before the nineteenth century Italy had a very long history in the field of collectionism of Chinese art. The princes and the most influential members of the aristocracy of every kingdoms in which the peninsula was divided owned in fact a number of objects coming from Asia, expecially porcelain but also lacquerware, textiles and curiosities from the natural world, which often entered in the Wunderkammern, the Cabinets of Wonders, those treasures rooms created with the intent to contain the knowledge of the whole world and as a mean to display royal power.
The most important of these ancient Italian collection was surely the one ammassed by Lorenzo ‘the Magnificent’ in Florence. At his death in 1492 an inventory of his goods listed about fifty Chinese porcelains, an impressive number considering that the Medici prince obtained them before the Portuguese begun to trade directly with Asian countries. [F. Morena, Dalle Indie orientali alla corte di Toscana. Collezioni di arte cinese e giapponese a Palazzo Pitti, Florence 2005, p. 17]
In the next centuries the amount of Chinese pieces in the Italian royal collections dramatically increased, as demonstrated by old documents regarding, for example, again the Medici family in Tuscany and the Savoy dynasty in Piedmont. [Porcellane e argenti del Palazzo Reale di Torino, Sonzogno 1986, pp. 341-435]
Detail of the Porcelain Cabinet, 1757. Naples, Museo di Capodimonte.
Although it became the main center of the revival of Classicism after the discoveries of Pompei and Ercolano, Naples had in the seventeenth and eighteenth century undoubtedly a certain availability of Chinese art. The exhistence in the city of the ‘Collegio dei Cinesi’ – an institution founded with the purpose to give a religious education to some young Chinese converts who followed the Jesuit Matteo Ripa (1682-1746) when in 1724 he returned to Italy after a long mission in China – surely contributed to the spread in the city of a taste for China, exemplified at its best by the amazing Porcelain Room realized in 1757 by the Capodimonte porcelain factory, originally destined to the royal villa in Portici and now in the Museo di Capodimonte.
Consequently, it is very plausible that Placido the Sangro had a certain familiarity with some aspects of Chinese artistic culture even during his youth in Naples. However, what is certain is that only few years after his arrival in Paris he began to acquire Far Eastern art with the project of constituting a collection.
According to the documentation preserved in the Duca di Martina Museum, the early purchases of Chinese art by the duke date back to 1864. From that year, he assiduously frequented the auctions organized at the Hôtel Drouot, at that time one of the most active enterprise in the world of art market. While following the auctions, trying to buy some pieces for his collection, the duke had the costume to annotate on the catalogues the price results, adding to the side of the descriptions of some ot the lots fast sketches of the objects.
Together with Drouot, expecially between 1866 and 1867, he frequented some of the most accreditate antique dealers in Paris. In the historical archive of the Duca di Martina Museum few receipts about Chinese pieces survive, and only in some cases the usually very short descriptions of the bought pieces could be associated with specific items, but they are enough to have an idea about where he purchased the objects for his collection
.
It should also be remembered that at that time there were very few dealers strictly specialized in Far Eastern art. It was easier to find Chinese items in the wider contest of ancient art market. In other words, single pieces of porcelain, jades or bronzes could be sold by the same dealer who more usually treated ‘old master’ paintings and drawings, or European furniture and ceramic.
The duke certainly bought Far Eastern objects – in some cases groups of pieces together – from the following antique dealers:
Dutrite, rue de Richelieu, 8: “Une tasse and couvercle, jade” (December 15 1866);
Deloris, rue Joubert, 19: “2 Compotiers Chine; 1 assiette … de la Chine; 2 Petit vases famille verte” (January 20 1869); “1 Vase Carré famille Verte fond …; 2 Buires famille Verte porcel de Chine (une restaurée); 1 Jardiniere famille Verte felcé; 1 Bouton de Mandarin Ivoire Sculp.; 1 petite boite a thè Chine” (January 30 1869); “1 Potiche Chine; 1 Vase Chine; 1 Potiche famille Verte; 3 Theieres Chine; 1 Grande Bouteille de Coreé; 7 assiettes Chine; 1 Vase fond noir; 2 Potiches famille Verte; 1 Bouteille Vieux Chine a jours; 2 Vases Carres famille Verte; 1 plat famille Verte a dragons” (February 22 1869); “1 Vase Chine avec dragons; 1 Pitong Chine Verte et Noire; 1 Bol porcel d. Chine; 1 Vase Chine Lion et dragon; 1 Vase Chine en relief; 1 Potiche Vieux Chine famille Verte; 2 Souris porcel de Chine” (March 6 1869);
Henri Stettiner, rue de Choiseul, 27, and rue Chabanais, 5: “deux cornets Chine, de la famille verte; deux bols Chine à six masques” (April 28 1869);
Mme Fleuriot, place de la Madeleine, 16:
Topenas, rue Joubert, 9: “1 vase Chine” (November 23 1867);
F. Willems, rue Joubert, 33: “Vase Chine bleu” (February 18 1867).
Other names of antique dealers frequented by the duke are known but with no specific references to China, such as Bellenot (boulevard des Capucines, 35), Fournier (rue de Faubourg Montmartre, 59), Laurent (rue Montpensier, 32), Nelson (rue Pasquier, 27), Bloche (Passage de l’Opéra, 16, e Galerie de l’Horloge), Topenas-Brunet (rue St. Lazare, 80).
From this documentation it appears clear that the purchases increased after 1867, the year the duke could visit the Universal Exhibition. China didn’t accept the invitation to partecipate to the event for political reasons. However, the promoters were able to organize a Chinese section, exhibited in a Chinese-style pavilion built in Champ de Mars together with objects from Japan and Siam.
Most of the exhibited Chinese porcelain, lacquer, jades and cloisonné enamels belonged to Charles de Montauban, the commander of the troops which partecipated to the Second Opium War some years before, and they were arguably the fruit of the sack of the Yuanming Yuan.6 Considering their outstanding provenance, the quality of those pieces should be very high, contributing to give also to visitors – and among them Placido de Sangro – a better idea of the sublimity of Chinese artistic tradition.
As esemplified by some of the short description provided by the Parisian antique dealers who sold pieces to the Duke of Martina and above cited, the classification of Chinese porcelain in families identified by the main colour of their enamelled decoration (Verte, Jaune, Rose, etc.) was already widely used towards 1867. Its first official appearance dates back to 1862, the year Albert Jacquemart and Edmond Le Blant published their fundamental Histoire artistique, industrielle et commerciale de la Porcelain.
Albert Jacquemart, in particular, was a reference figure for every porcelain collector, not only in Paris, and a collector he himself. His name is in fact associated with all the great collectors of Chinese porcelain in the seventh and eighth decades of the nineteenth century, such as for example Adrien Dubouché and Paul Gasnault. [L. Chabanne, in C. Shimizu (edited by), L’Odyssée de la porcelaine chinoise. Collections du Musée national de Céramique, Sèvres et due muse national Adrien Dubouché, Limoges, exhibition catalogue, Paris 2003, pp. 9-14]
It is very plausible that Jacquemart and Placido de Sangro knew each other, and it can also be assumed that the conoisseur had some role in the choice of the pieces for the collection of the Italian nobleman from a certain time, probably from around 1869.
Some European porcelains belonged to the duke are in fact illustrated in the third volume of Jacquemart’s Les Merveilles de la Céramique, while no pieces from his collection is published in the previous two volumes of the same book, the first dedicated to Orient (1866) and the second to the ceramics from antiquity to Renaissance (1868).
In that same 1869 the duke also lent some of the pieces of his Chinese collection to the Oriental section of the Exposition des Beaux-Arts appliqués à l’industrie which inaugurated in Paris at the Palais de l’Industrie thanks to the effort of some scholars who usually wrote in the Gazette des beaux-arts, the most influential art magazine of those years, and among them Albert Jacquemart himself.
The exhibition was accompanied by the publication in the same year of a guide, [Exposition des Beaux-Arts appliqués à l’industrie. Guide du visiteur au Musée oriental, Paris 1869] while Albert Jacquemart wrote a long review that was published in the Gazette des beaux-arts. [A. Jacquemart, Exposition de l’Union Centrale des Beaux-Arts appliqués a l’industrie. Musée oriental. I. Inde, in “Gazette des Beaux-arts”, 1869, 2, pp. 332-351; A. Jacquemart, Exposition de l’Union Centrale des Beaux-Arts appliqués a l’industrie. Musée oriental. Chine, in “Gazette des Beaux-arts”, 1869, 2, pp. 473-494]
Thanks to these two texts it is possible to have a more precise knowledge of that important event (who were the organizers and who partecipated with the loan of the objects), giving also a more accurate idea of the state of the collectionism of Chinese art in Paris in those years.
The guide opens with a list of the names of the sponsors, who were mainly antique dealers who also lent their own pieces, and among them some of the suppliers of the duke (Mme Fleuriot, Stettiner, Bellenot), together with other well known pioneers in the field of Far Eastern art market in Europe, such as Mme Desoye, the owner of a famous shop frequented by personages such as Edmond de Goncourt and Charles Baudelaire.
Then it describes the content of the rooms, each filled with object of various kinds, grouped partly according to their typology and partly according to the collector they belonged. Among the lenders, the admiral Couvent des Boys, the baron A. De Rothschild, the curator of the imperial museums M.F. Villot, the curator of the ceramic museum in Sèvres M. Riocreux, the painter Gustave Brion, Albert and Jules Jacquemart, the inspector for fine arts Ernest Chesneau, only to cite a few.
In our context, the guide and the review are and indispensable instrument of research because they offer very interesting information about the development of the collection of the Duke of Martina at that time. Some of the objects described in the two texts can in fact be easily identify with pieces now preserved in the Neapolitan museum. In some other cases, unfortunately, the association between the description and an object is not immediate. The reasons to explain this fact can be mainly two: the description could be in some cases not detailed enough or – more plausible – the duke in later years, or a member of his family after his death, decided to cede some pieces for motivations, at this moment, impossible to find.
According to the guide, most of of the Chinese and Japanese pieces from the collection of Placido De Sangro – described as “remarquable par la beuté des grandes pièces” – were displayed in an armoire in Room C. [Exposition des Beaux-Arts appliqués à l’industrie. Guide du visiteur au Musée oriental, Paris 1869, pp. 14-15]
In addition to the identified pieces, among the Chinese objects the list describes also: “un plat de la famille verte représentant un empereur rendant la justice”, “une petite tasse à couvercle et une potiche aplatie”, “une petite bouteille jaune, décorée de passiflores, datée de Van-li (1573 à 1619)”, “Une bouteille truitée vert foncé”, “un grand vase à eau avec passants”.
Some other objects from the collection of the duke were also displayed in other rooms, such as “Une théière à décor vermiculé rouge avec fleurs verte” in the section dedicated to India, [Exposition des Beaux-Arts appliqués à l’industrie. Guide du visiteur au Musée oriental, Paris 1869, p. 31] and some other pieces in the section dedicated to Middle Eastern art.
Some of the items in the guide are also mentioned in the review by Jacquemart, who described the duke as an “appréciateur délicat des ouvrages de l’Inde et de la Perse”, singing the praises of his collection in different passages of the text. [A. Jacquemart, Exposition de l’Union Centrale des Beaux-Arts appliqués a l’industrie. Musée oriental. Chine, in “Gazette des Beaux-arts”, 1869, 2, pp. 473-494]
Towards the end of 1869 the duke decided to come back to Naples. However, in the following years he frequently travelled to Paris – where he had an apartment in Place de la Madeleine – and other Northern European cities, such as Bruxelles where he bought some pieces from Maryen (Rue des Petit Carmes, 4a) and Slaes (Montagne de la Cour, 52, “Tasse & Soucoupe Chine, Cailles; Tasse & Soucoupe Chine, Mandarins; Tasse & Soucoupe Chine, famille Verte”, November 20 1873), and Amsterdam, where he acquired some objects from Boas-Berg (Warmoestraat), Abercrombie and Van Hotum.
The Parisian antique dealers continued to write to the duke also when he resided in Naples, offering him new pieces to acquire, in some cases declaring of being available to bring them to Naples to show to the nobleman.
He then begun to frequent also the local antique dealers. In 1876 he bought a Chinese vase from Ianniello (Strada Costantinopoli, 97, and Riviera di Chiaia, 61). The following year he participated to the Esposizione dell’Arte Antica Napoletana, lending mainly pieces of his important collection of Capodimonte porcelain, one of the best then available in the city.
Placido de Sangro was therefore able in only few years to impose his figure as one of the most important collector in Naples.
The death in 1881 of his beloved son was certainly a blow for the duke who didn’t acquire any object for his collection for many years. According to the documentation in the museum, he restarted to frequent the Neapolitan antique dealers only in 1888, three years before his death.
During the stay in Naples, the duke displayed his exceptional collection in his residence located in the Palazzo de Sangro in Via Nilo. The most important document related to it is an illustrated article written in 1893, two years after the death of the duke. [A. Maresca di Serracapriola, Il Museo del Duca di Martina, in “Napoli Nobilissima”, 1893, pp. 49-52, 74-77, 109-111]
The author emphasized the great eterogeneity of the collection, which spanned from European archeology to Chinese art, from Medioeval ivories to Islamic majolica, from furnitures to Japanese porcelain, from paintings to tobacco boxes, from ancient jewels to Baroque carved hardstones. It was an eclectic collection, of a kind very popular in the second half of the nineteenth century when the taste favoured a new interpretation of the history of the arts trying to eliminate the obsolete differences between ‘major arts’ (painting, sculpture and architecture) and ‘minor art’, as promoted by the Arts and Crafts movement headed by William Morris.
Looking at the photographs of his house in Naples taken before he passed away, it is clear that the duke didn’t arrange his collection as a museum. He simply lived surrounded by the fine objects he bought in a whole life, disseminating them in the rooms in which he daily spent his time.
After the death of the duke in 1891, the collection was inherited by his nephew Riccardo de Sangro (1866-1911), count of Marsi, who decided that it would be given upon his death to the city of Naples, a desire already manifested by the duke and his son when they both were still alife. However, the collection remained in Palazzo Spinelli – the residence of the count – until 1924-1925 when it was finally transferred to Villa Floridiana at the behest of his wife Maria Spinelli di Scalea, who also gifted the objects from her personal collection. The passage was completed with the acquisition in 1978 of some other objects belonged to Riccardo de Sangro (1889-1978), the last duke of the lineage, a large part of them he received as family inheritance, probably acquired by the first Placido de Sangro.
In 1931 the museum was opened to the public.
Formed by more than one thousand pieces, the Duca di Martina’s collection of Chinese art stands out for the typological variety represented and its remarkable general quality. Certainly the most conspicuous group is that of porcelain, with pieces that exemplify many of the types produced during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Great part of the porcelain in the collection was explicitly made in China to satisfy the demand of the European countries, but there are also examples of porcelain for the domestic market, some of which marked with the imperial nianhao.
The most ancient, and certainly one of the most precious and rare piece in the porcelain section, is the Yuan dynasty ‘blue and white’ meiping vase with a gorgeous decoration of a phoenix amidst floral scrolls. Equally rare is the ‘blue and white’ cup dated 1541, with the coat of arms of the Portuguese Abreu family and an inscription in Latin, commissioned by Pedro de Faria who was then governor of Malacca. In general, the Ming and Qing ‘blue and white’ section exemplifies the evolution of this typology which was so successful in Europe since the beginning of the sixteenth century.
The ‘Transitional porcelain’ section is also noteworthy, and it perfectly introduces – by chromatic affinities and chronological evolution – the ‘Famille Verte’ nucleus, certainly one of the best represented in the collection. Large dishes, bowls of different sizes and shapes, wall-fountains, boxes, small sculptures, tiles, ewers and a great variety of vases, one of them with a vivid decoration of a dragon and a tiger flying amidst cloud with the nianhao mark of the Kangxi imperor.
A large part of the porcelain collection dates back to the Qing period. We find most of the types made in China at that time for the export to Europe. In addition to the Famille Verte, we have Imari pieces, ‘enamels on biscuit’, Famille Rose, a great variety of monochrome glazes, Chinese porcelain over-decorated in Europe, most of them produced during the Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong reigns.
Some of these porcelains present on the base the ancient numbering of the collection of Augustus the Strong, and therefore they belonged to the greatest historical collector of Chinese porcelain who was able to accumulate an incredible quantity of pieces mostly displayed in the Japanese Palace, a building explicitly erected for that purpose. [E. Ströber, «La maladie de porcelaine». East Asian Porcelain from the Collection of Augustus the Strong, Leipzig 2001]
In addition to these pieces, undoubtedly coming from the Dresden collection, other porcelain from the Duke of Martina’s collection can be compared to pieces still preserved in the German Porzellansammlung. These analogies, on the one hand testify the extraordinary heterogeneity of the collection of the Elector of Saxony, on the other hand confirm a tendency of the taste of Placido de Sangro, who certainly had a predilection for those Chinese porcelains that between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries formed the largest princely collections in Europe.
A number of these Qing dynasty porcelains are embellished with metal mounts, silver and especially gilt bronze. This is not surprising. If the custom to add a ormolu mount – with the aim to exalt the rarity of Chinese porcelain and to protect the fragility of the body – spread in Europe already from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, before the Portuguese first started a direct trade with China in the early sixteenth century, this fashion reached a peak during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis in France under the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI and the empire of Napoleon, inspired by the higly prized hardstones carvings collected by Louis XIV which were often enriched with gilt metal mounts, [D. Alcouffe, Les Gemmes de la Couronne, Paris 2001] and thanks to the insights of some art dealers who met the taste of such personages such as Madame de Pompadour and Queen Marie Antoinette who greatly admired Chinese porcelain. [R. Bird, Introduction: European mounts on Chinese and Japanese porcelain, in J. Ayers, Chinese and Japanese Works of Art in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen, 3 voll. London 2016: II, pp. 349-390]
The bronze gilt mounts, in some cases added simply to underline some features of the vase or the bowl, and in other cases elaborately casted by famous workshops such as the one headed by Jean-Claude Chambellan Duplessis, followed the stylistic artistic evolution of those times, going from the firmness of the earlier late Baroque, through the sinuous lightening of the Rococo, passing from the recovery of simmetry and balance of the Neoclassicism, until the imposing harmony of the Empire taste.
The cospicuous presence of Chinese porcelain pieces with metal mount is a further demonstration that the Duke of Martina mainly acquired pieces originally belonged to historical European collections.
The cloisonné section comprises about fifty items, almost equally divided in pieces from Ming dynasty and from the Qing period. Large basins from the Wanli period and later monumental vases such the as the zun from the Kangxi era, smaller pieces from the sixteenth century, and some examples realized during the Qianlong period, which signs the apex of the use of this decorative technique which originated in Europe some centuries before its developments in China, as pointed out by the artist Philippe Burty in his pioneering text on the subject, published in Paris in the years the Italian nobleman was still residing in the France’s capital. [P. Burty, Les Emaux cloisonnés anciens et modernes, Paris 1868]
Among the few metal objects decorated with painted enamels in the Duca di Martina’s collection, the small bottle vase with the Kangxi yuzhi mark, dating to 1720 circa, stands out for his rarity as a piece which perfectly embodies the ability of Chinese artists active in the imperial workshops in Beijing in elaborating innovative ideas coming from Europe through the intermediation of those Jesuits entered the grace of the Chinese emperor.
Among the ‘Three Emperors’ of the Qing dynasty, Qianlong was probably the one who gave the major impulse to art. It is known his incredible activity in collecting and promoting all the forms of the artistical productions. His passion and deep knowledge for the ancient art of China is well known, demonstrated by the commission to the imperial workshops of objects which resembled in shape and decoration the glorious splendor of Chinese past. The Duca di Martina’s collection displays a number of carved hardstones that witness this practice, in particular the wonderful pale green jade archaistic vase with the incised Qianlong’s nianhao followed by the two characters fanghu, which literally means “imitating antiquity”.
This precious vase is however only the quality peak of the Duca di Martina’s collection of carved hardstones, which doesn’t comprise only jade but also carnelian, agate, jadeite, red diasper, smoked rock crystal and some interesting examples of Mughal style jades.
The Chinese art of carving is exemplified in the Neaples’ Museum also by some ivories, a bitong from the Kangxi period, a small hardstones-inlaid table screen and a faboulous pierced bird-cage, a real tour de force of technique and patience for the anonymous artist who created it between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, and by a rare carved red lacquer stick.
Finally, the group of bronzes, which is formed by containers of various shapes and functions, some of them linked with the practice of burning incense, such as the silver inlaid tripod which brings the signature of Shi sou, some others traditionally in the equipment of literati, such as the small partially gilt vase with the mark of Hu Wenming zuo, who was the head of a famous workshop active in Yunjian between the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century. Most of these bronzes can be dated to the period between the Song/ Yuan dynasties to late Ming and early Qing periods, also the few sculptures representing deities of Buddhism, Daoism and popular religion.
