Cloisonné enamel censer

Blue wire, fired glass, a shape borrowed from ancient bronze. The cloisonne censer took a foreign craft and made it imperial.

Cloisonne builds a design from copper wire bent into cells, then fills the cells with coloured enamel and fires the lot. The form here is a ding, the ritual tripod of the Bronze Age, reborn in a Yuan-Ming technique that reached China along the silk routes.

What began as imported ornament ended as a Chinese court art with its own reign name. The lotus scroll wrapping the body is pure decoration; the ding shape underneath is pure antiquity. The two together are the joke and the point.

Image © The Palace Museum. View the original in the Palace Museum collection.