Art: Cathay’s Treasure

Travelers to Venice last week found themselves in the midst of a major celebration honoring history’s most successful travel-book author—Marco Polo. For the 700th anniversary of his birth, the city which once scoffed at his fantastic tales of the Orient* gathered from eleven countries (not including Red China) an exhibition of 951 pieces of Chinese art that would have awed even Marco Polo himself.

While scholars pored over Polo family documents, including Marco’s will, 500 tourists a day filed through the Doges’ Palace to look at priceless works in bronze, jade, ceramics, textiles and lacquers, dating from the Yin dynasty (1766-1122 B.C.) to the Ming dynasty (A.D. 1368-1644).

Largest in the exhibit was the ceramics display. It included funerary furniture—glazed terra-cotta figures from the tombs of well-heeled gentlemen of old Cathay who had wished to insure themselves an afterlife of ease and luxury with plentiful concubines. In such art the Chinese were rigorously realistic, rendering a man as a man and a horse as a horse, but with their porcelains they showed a subtle fairy fragility. Some of the pure white cups, plates and vases of the Tang dynasty (A.D. 618-907) had that beautiful simplicity which inspired the sages to say that their perfection was the work of nature rather than of man. More numerous than the Tang pieces were Ming blue and white porcelains, decorated with dragons and floral designs whose blues were as luminous as sapphires.

Many of the 130 paintings were as esoteric to the ordinary visitor as Chinese calligraphy. Among the most popular were the great Sung master Ma Yiian’s fan-shaped Two Sages and an Attendant Under a Plum Tree, and a misty mountain-and-river scene in black ink and dainty colors, like dilute pastels, by the lyth century master, K’un Ts’an.

Venice’s greatest triumph was a display of 163 ritual bronzes, semiabstractions of dragons and sundry monsters, mellowed by the patina of the centuries. It was the age of the pieces, dating back to the Yin dynasty, that most impressed the nonexpert art lovers. But it was their forms, especially one unique three-legged chüeh (wine goblet) of the Yin period, that delighted the connoisseurs. Said Florence’s aged (89) art oracle, Expatriate Bernard Berenson: “The best collection of Chinese bronzes ever brought together under one roof in Europe.”

* In 1298 while a prisoner of war in Genoa, Marco Polo dictated The Description of the World, his account of “the diversities of kingdoms, provinces, and regions of all parts of the East.” A copy annotated by Christopher Columbus is in the Biblioteca Capitular Colombina in Seville.