A Study On The Narrative Portraits Of Bronze In Eastern Zhou Dynasty

The portraits on bronze in the Eastern Zhou Dynasty is one of the earliest narrative art in China.It represents the solemn etiquette scenes,which is the code and key to the study of China’s early aesthetics and ritual and music civilization.Looking back at the history of the study of bronze portraits in the Eastern Zhou Dynasty,it can be found that the ancients spared no effort to use the most advanced decoration techniques of the time to engrave these complicated ceremonial scenes on bronzes,and it was almost the same time as the writing of "Yi Li".Simple "the destruction of the ritual and music system" or "toys" can hardly be the interdependence between the portraits and the text.Therefore,clarifying the content and theme of the portrait and digging out the narrative mode of the portrait are the key to reductive analysis of bronze portraits.First of all,the narrative portrait is based on bronze.If you only proceed from the visual experience,and directly analyze the flat portrait copy pictures,it is easy to produce subjective assumptions.We should "return the ornamentation to the utensils",that is,fully consider the impact of objective factors such as the space size of the utensils,the curvature of the walls,the position management,and the decorative techniques on the portrait,and through the complex representations of portraits to explore its prototype and essence.It is also necessary to place it in the context of early visual perception and composition rules,and to rethink how two-dimensional portraits "translate" three-dimensional space.It can be found that the motif of picking mulberries expresses not the social customs of "male and female dating" on the theme of love,but rather a mulberry picking ceremony for sacrificial clothing.The shooting motif does not reflect the local shooting ceremony,nor the competition shooting held in the countryside or outdoors,but the large shooting ceremony held under the building of the shooting house for the emperor and the princes to choose the assistants.The motif of "Feast" does not depict the scene of feasting with joy and laughter,but a sacrificial ritual that uses bells and drums music to make gods come,music and dance make people happy,sacrifices for gods to enjoy,and wines for gods to drink.Together with the motif of war or hunting,it is gathered on the bronzes closely around "the most important thing is sacrifice and military".Secondly,ritual rehearsal is an immaterial performance performed by characters in four-dimensional time and space.Today,people can only get a glimpse from the remaining static bronze portraits and flat texts,so it is very necessary to add time and dynamic elements to "using etiquette to interpret the portrait" and "reading carefully between pictures and texts".It was further discovered that the portraits on carved bronzes were layered or consecutively juxtaposed with rituals at different times to show the grandeur of the ceremony.However,on the bronze portraits molded by molding,a single motif adopts the "character animation" narrative mode,that is,a single(or two)characters are "moved" to fully reproduce the performance process of the unit festival,just like a picture frame by frame in a animation.The former presents a right-to-left narrative order based on the rotating inner wall of the artifact,while the latter presents a right-to-left,left-to-right,top-down,and bottom-up narrative order due to the different spatial fields of each motif.The latter is particularly special.Finally,the bronze portraits are placed in the long river of history to explore the origins of narrative portraits,and the evolution of other media such as murals,silk paintings,pottery,lacquerware and later(Han Dynasty)art in the same period.It is not difficult to find that the portraits with the themes of picking mulberry,shooting rituals,and sacrificial rituals are unique to bronze wares,and the narrative mode of character animation is unique in early portrait art.In addition,combined with oracle bone inscriptions,bronze inscriptions,related original texts and tomb information,the attributes of the eternal medium of portrait bronzes and their social roles and functions as ritual vessels are very obvious.