Section of a Coffin Platform: Horizontal Panel (550–77): Art, History and Details

Section of a Coffin Platform: Horizontal Panel (550–77) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This richly ornamented stone construction is the long, front side of a coffin platform ultimately derived from raised wooden beds that are still popular in China today. Now in five pieces (presumably cut to facilitate transportation after it was excavated in the 1900s), the three legs and horizontal spans may have originally been created as a single massive slab. Sockets cut in the top of the stone (some of which overlap the modern divisions) show how this slab would have been linked to the back with crosspieces also capable of supporting a top surface of flat stone planks. Like the few examples discovered intact in northern Chinese aristocratic tombs, the most elaborate decoration occurs on the front surface of the coffin platform. The design is dominated by the three large vertical panels, corresponding to the legs, that contain animated high-relief depictions of three directional guardians: the White Tiger of the West, the Red Bird of the South, and the Green Dragon of the East. These three, along with the Snake-Entwined Tortoise of the North and the Yellow Dragon of the Center, were mainstays of Chinese cosmology linked in a system devised as early as the Han dynasty to elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, and water), functions, planets, and musical tones, among others. Not only illustrating the persistent appeal of these traditional apotropaic symbols, this scheme suggests that the platform was placed against the back, northern wall of a tomb that would have been entered from the south. The layered carving technique of these principal motifs as well as the shallow relief dragons, masks, and tendrils engraved in the horizontal spans recall forms found in both imperially sponsored tombs and cave chapels of the late sixth century.

Object facts

• Title: Section of a Coffin Platform: Horizontal Panel
• Date: 550–77
• Culture: China, Northern Qi dynasty (550-577)
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: limestone
• Dimensions: Overall: 45.7 x 211.4 x 10.8 cm (18 x 83 1/4 x 4 1/4 in.); Panel: 25.4 x 64.8 x 10.8 cm (10 x 25 1/2 x 4 1/4 in.)
• Collection: China - Southern Dynasties
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1982.260.b

A detail from the museum

Each horizontal panel has a monster mask in the center with dragon heads in profile at either end.

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Lange

Further reading listed by the museum

• Pearlstein, Elinor. “Pictorial Stones from Chinese Tombs.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 71, no. 9 (November 1984): 302–331.
• Wilson, J. Keith. "Powerful Form and Potent Symbol: The Dragon in Asia." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 77, no. 8 (October 1990): 286–323.
• Cunningham, Michael R., Stanislaw J. Czuma, Anne E. Wardwell, and J. Keith Wilson. Masterworks of Asian Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1998.

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.