A rare pair of gilt-bronze 'taotie and figure' door handles, pushou


Warring States Period/Han DynastyEach handle finely cast in the form of a taotie mask with rounded eyes, surmounted by a smiling humanoid figure with muscular arms and chest, the masks' elongated beaks curled at the end forming a hook to suspend the flat ring handles, box. The handles 12.5cm (4 3/4in) wide; the rings 11.5cm (4 3/8in) diam. (5).
|戰國/漢 銅鎏金鋪首銜環 一對Provenance: The Mengdiexuan Collection來源： 香港夢蝶軒收藏The inclusion of a human figure in this design is very unusual. See a bronze ring handle with a related human-form decoration, excavated in 1968 at Mancheng, Hebei Province, from the tomb of Liu Sheng (d.113 BC) in the Hebei Provincial Museum which was illustrated in the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition catalogue Age of Empires: Chinese Art of the Qin and Han Dynasties (221 B.C.-A.D. 220), New York, 2017, pp.184-185, no.103.A similar pair of gilt-bronze ring handles, Warring States/ Han dynasty, was sold at Bonhams New York, 30 October 2017, lot 44.