Hollow-Legged Tripod (Li Ding) (late 900 BCE): Art, History and Details

Hollow-Legged Tripod (Li Ding) (late 900 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This food vessel exhibits a new decorative trend of metropolitan Western Zhou foundries. Zoomorphic images became increasingly abstract and subject to linear elaboration. The dominating animal mask (taotie) of the Shang is here transformed, dissolved, and dissected into intricate patterns of curving bands and median grooves. The design is abstract but not devoid of symbolic contents and functions. A smooth and even gray-green patina--the result of natural corrosion during burial--covers the outside and creates a new visual impact on the surface decoration.

Object facts

• Title: Hollow-Legged Tripod (Li Ding)
• Date: late 900 BCE
• Culture: China, Shaanxi province, Xi'an, Western Zhou dynasty (c. 1046–771 BCE)
• Type: Metalwork
• Technique: bronze
• Dimensions: Diameter: 27.7 cm (10 7/8 in.); Overall: 23 cm (9 1/16 in.)
• Collection: China - Zhou Dynasty
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1961.203

Collection credit

Gift from various donors by exchange and the John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Ho, Wai-Kam. “Shang and Chou Bronzes.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 51, no. 7 (September 1964): 175–187.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1969. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1969.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.