Art Market Magazine - Visit zone-secure.net
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Celadon<br />
Jade<br />
€375,000<br />
Dating from the Qianlong period, this vase in<br />
celadon jade with veins and russet inclusions<br />
collected €375,000 at its Drouot sale on 19 February<br />
(Renard auction house). A new victory for the stone<br />
that has always been popular in Asia and has a truly<br />
ancient success story; in China it was already the<br />
object of commercial exchanges in the Neolithic<br />
period. Jade is closely associated with power.<br />
A dictionary dating from the end of the Han dynasty,<br />
the ‘Shuowen jiezi by Xu Shen’ (lines 58-147), tells<br />
how at one point, the character ‘yu’, meaning jade,<br />
also meant ‘sovereign’. In fact, the most beautiful<br />
varieties of jade, privileges of the powerful, have<br />
been associated with different rituals since very<br />
ancient times. The great Chinese thinker Confucius<br />
himself assigned correspondences between jade<br />
and fundamental moral virtues in his ‘Book of Rites’.<br />
For example, ‘Its perfect density and its extreme<br />
hardness represent the assurance of intelligence’.<br />
Concerned with legitimising the Qing dynasty’s<br />
Manchu origins to the Chinese population, the Qianlong<br />
Emperor initiated a vast programme to recover<br />
the nation’s history. The formal and archaic decorative<br />
vocabulary of this vase places it within this political<br />
period, and furthermore by its employment of a<br />
material more sought-after than gold. Sylvain Alliod<br />
China, Qianlong period (1735-1796), quadrangular vase<br />
in céladon jade with veins and russet inclusions.<br />
28,5 x 14,5 x 5,5 cm.<br />
AUCTION RESULTS THE MAGAZINE<br />
N° 23 I GAZETTE DROUOT INTERNATIONAL<br />
67