Robert Bagley ǀ Ancient Chinese Bronzes: Art & Technology

The bronze vessels that ancient Chinese aristocrats used in rituals of sacrifice to their ancestors are both great works of art and products of the highest technology of their time. Today we put them in art museums, elevating the artists who designed them over the technologists who executed them. But the designers and executants were almost certainly the same people—products of the same apprenticeship. This talk will focus on two widely separated moments in the history of the bronzes to explore the relation between what we call “art” and what we call “technology.”

Robert Bagley, emeritus professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, specializes in neolithic and Bronze Age China. He is the author of Shang Ritual Bronzes in the Arthur M. Sackler Collections, published by the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation in 1987. His recent publications include Max Loehr and the Study of Chinese Bronzes: Style and Classification in the History of Art (2008), the chapter on Shang archaeology in The Cambridge History of Ancient China (1999), and articles on ancient Chinese music theory, the origin of the Chinese writing system, and early Bronze Age metal technology.

Robert Bagley is a scholar in residence this fall doing research for the upcoming exhibition, “Eternal Offerings: Chinese Ritual Bronzes from the Minneapolis Institute of Art.”

This lecture is made possible by the generous support of the Elsa Carpenter Asian Art Lecture Fund.

Generous support provided by: the Henry Luce Foundation, the Blakemore Foundation, and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.

$10; $5 for MIA members. Free for members of the Asian Art Affinity Group. To register, call (612) 870-6323 or register online.