A Magnificent and Rare Carved Cizhou ‘Floral’ Bottle Vase, Song Dynasty

Blood No. 472 is a magnificent example of a very early Si Chao ware from the southern dynasty. But then it's not early. Well, it's early because most of those wares are actually from the Yuan or early Ming dynasty when they have these elaborate design patterns. This one actually, some scholars dated it to the Yuan to early Ming period. But we are very confident that it is earlier, that it is an actual 13th century piece, like southern Song dynasty. And there's a decent number of reasons. The first one being that during these periods, vessels were very rarely made for decorative purposes. This was really made as a water bottle. And so it was carried in a leather basket for most of the time, which explains why there is significant glaze wear all the way from the base to exactly this area where the leather basket would end. We still see typical spiral marks, which are not regular, but quite irregular, which shows that the way it was potted was with very little to no support from mechanical devices. And another mark that is rarely found is here that the lip of the vase is not glazed and also reveals the wear. We're not 100% sure. We see here that the glaze stops evenly around the lip. But then on some areas like here, we see also it's worn off. And this is not possible to separate exactly. It's also glazed on the interior, but still reveals very distinct pottery marks all along the inside of the neck. So when it comes to this floral band, which is here in relief, it's carved and incised and shows some glaze gaps around the raised areas. This has been in the same family collection since the 1970s, almost 50 years. And there is an old label on the base, which... The inscription is illegible. It's in brown ink, but it's not really possible to decipher it. It does not look like German. No, no. It appears that this label is even older than the 1970s. I think we had a vase with a large disc-shaped, funnel-shaped neck that had circumferential bands, but they were not limited to just a small border, but more went all over the vessel, which is more typical. But I think the fact that its design is actually sparse and small is all to the fact that this would have been covered with a device enabling to carry the bottle, so it would not make any sense to have a design here.