Top Story of a Tower (Tomb Model) (Eastern Han dynasty (A.D.25–220)): Artwork and History

Top Story of a Tower (Tomb Model) (Eastern Han dynasty (A.D.25–220)) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as China.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

As burial practices filtered down from the Han aristocracy to officials and landowners, tomb models related to farming, an honored occupation, became increasingly popular. These models provide rough but lively impressions of rural compounds. The granary, used to store millet, barley, and wheat, was depicted either as a jar or as a small building. This building combines realistic and imaginative details: angular brackets support a tiled roof with ridgepoles and roundels and crowned with an oversize bird and floral roof ends.

Object facts

• Title: Top Story of a Tower (Tomb Model)
• Date: Eastern Han dynasty (A.D.25–220)
• Artist attribution: China
• Place of origin: China
• Medium: Earthenware with green lead glaze
• Dimensions: 44.5 × 37.5 × 38 cm (17 1/2 × 14 3/4 × 14 15/16 in.)
• Type: Sculpture
• Department: Arts of Asia
• Reference number: 1924.227

Collection credit

Lucy Maud Buckingham Collection

View the original

Explore the artwork in the Art Institute's collection, including its image and the museum's current catalogue details.

The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.