Jade. Western Zhou period, 11th - 10th century BC
玉鱼- 西周, 公元å‰11世紀–å‰10世紀
長 6.5 厘米
Contrary to the example lot 72, this pendant is has an arched body, a variant of the fish pendants often encountered in excavated artefacts and jades from collections. The ornament is provided with two holes for suspension, one in the mouth and the second in the tail area. The fish is also carved in the round, probably because the pendant was obtained by reworking the section of a broken jade ring; as attested by numerous archaeological finds, re-carving older fragments of jade to obtain small animal-shaped pendants was a common practice adopted by the Chinese carvers of the late Shang and Western Zhou periods. The fish is naturalistically detailed, with the dorsal fin slightly raised and rendered through minute, striated lines; the jade is translucent and very light green in colour, with traces of soil encrustations in the area of the head.
For a number of similar arched fish-shaped pendants, see those in The Harvard Art Museums and published in Max Loehr and Louisa G. Fitzgerald Huber, Ancient Chinese Jades from the Grenville L. Winthrop Collection in the Fogg Art Museum,Cambridge 1975, nos. from 273 to 293 and Jessica Rawson, Chinese Jade from the Neolithic to the Qing, Chicago 2002, pp.228-229.
This jade is published in Filippo Salviati, Mysterious Jades of Ancient China, Edition Zacke 2014.
LENGTH 6,5 CM
From an Austrian private collection