The Problem of Meaning in Early Chinese Ritual Bronzes.

• Author: Kroll. Paul W.

Abundantly illustrated, this handsome volume publishes the papers delivered at the fifteenth Percival David Foundation Colloquy on the Art and Archaeology of Asia, held in June 1990 at S.O.A.S. The topic central to all of the papers is how far (if at all) can "meaning" be discovered in the designs and symbols that decorate Shang and Zhou bronzes. Some forty years ago Max Loehr proposed a scheme of analysis for the stylistic development of Shang bronzes, prudently emphasizing questions of visual, surface ornament over the intangibles of philosophy, world-view, and Zeitgeist. Following in the wake of the endless Chinese archaeological excavations of recent decades, many scholars from Asia and the West have sought to interpret the meaning of early ritual vessels in a broader context and from a wider range of perspectives.

One of the most enthusiastic exponents of this approach is Sarah Allan, whose paper "Art and Meaning" (earlier published as chapter six of her book, The Shape of the Turtle: Myth, Art and Cosmos in Early China [S.U.N.Y. Press, 1991]) opens this volume (pp. 9-33) and largely sets the terms for the papers and discussions that follow. Allan is confident that satisfactory meanings can be attached to the more prominent motifs on bronze ritual vessels, extrapolating from the knowledge to be inferred of Shang religious life from other sources. "Although the art of Shang bronzes is not representational, it is nevertheless iconographically meaningful.... The themes are those of death and transformation and the world of the beyond: the taotie which is made up of animals and humans used in sacrifice, its open mouth, a passage to the other world, eating or killing; the dragon of the underworld and the bird of the spirit world above, often conjoined as a single image; snakes which slough their skins and signify death; deer which continually shed and regrow their antlers" (p. 32).

Robert Bagley argues for the more "agnostic" position in his "Meaning and Explanation" (pp. 34-55). Beginning from a telling comparison with the stylistically gorgeous but symbolically opaque interlace and animal motifs found in illuminated Insular manuscripts as well as mirrors and other objects from the seventh and eighth centuries A.D. in the British Isles, Bagley questions whether the adventurous analyses of Allan and other scholars can actually be upheld, given that we have virtually no contemporaneous evidence regarding the use or interpretation of the...