For a long time I used to call Han Dynasty on Third Avenue to order takeout. In those days I didn’t know one dynasty from another so I’d always forget the name, and would google ‘chinese restaurant dynasty third avenue’ to get it to come up. Eventually I learned the basics of the periodization of Chinese history, in order to teach survey courses, but it was too late—by the time the name registered in a way that would stop me from forgetting it, Han Dynasty had fallen off my takeout radar. I haven’t had my old order, the cumin tofu, in years. It’s probably still good.
I only know the main dynasties, but even this minimal familiarity is useful in an art museum. If I read on a wall label that Taizong, the second Tang emperor, had limestone reliefs made of his six favorite horses, of course the dates are there on the label, but they wouldn’t sink in if I didn’t already have a sense of when the Tang dynasty was and how it’s remembered. Three centuries of stability and prosperity, lots of trade with Central Asia, all the goods going through the desert on the backs of camels; some degree of religious tolerance, at least at first, with Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism all incorporated into official ideology; and a capital, Xi’an, that was one of the biggest cities in the world at the time, built on an orderly plan and providing a regular, bureaucratic life to those who passed the civil service examination.
All of which is to say, I don’t know enough about China or Chinese art to write about it, but I can probably get away with a few paragraphs. And as it happens, while four of the reliefs of Emperor Taizong’s favorite horses are in the Stele Forest Museum in Xi’an, the other two are among the prize possessions of the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. There’s Saluzi (‘Autumn Dew’), who has been struck by an arrow, which General Qiu Xinggong is removing. And there’s Quanmaogua (the name describes the horse’s hair as curly and saffron yellow), also struck by arrows. They were made between 636 and 649 for Taizong’s mausoleum complex at Mount Jiuzong, not far from Xi’an. Three horses for each side of his tomb. Thirteen centuries later the art dealer C. T. Loo sold Saluzi and Quanmaogua to the museum for $125,000.1
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When Loo (1880–1957), an orphan from a village in Northern China who had made his way to Shanghai and then to Paris, opened his first gallery in 1908, Chinese art had been known in Europe for centuries. But that was export art, made with the foreign market in mind. So Augustus the Strong of Dresden had had his case of Porzellankrankheit (porcelain madness) but until Loo established himself in Paris no one had tried to sell archaic bronzes and jades, early Buddhist sculpture, or Tang ceramics to wealthy Westerners. Loo’s gallery, then, didn’t satisfy a demand, it created one. He opened a second gallery in New York in 1916, which flourished until the stock market crash of 1929 and again from the mid-thirties until 1949, when the Communist Revolution cut him off from his suppliers (who did not fare well in the years that followed). Without wading into the controversies of the seventy-five years since he retired, I’ll only say that Loo’s legacy is disputed. He can be blamed for wholesale looting, for the siphoning off of China’s cultural heritage to the West, or else praised for the same, since objects in Western collections were safe from the iconoclasm of the Cultural Revolution.
Or fine, I’ll wade this far in—what’s done is done, and I was glad to see the reliefs when I went to the Penn Museum last month. What I knew about the place in advance can be set down in a few lines. I knew it was part of the University of Pennsylvania and had grown out of archeological digs conducted by the school, and that its curatorial areas complemented, rather than duplicated, those of the bigger museum on the other side of the Schuylkill. So no Rogier van der Weyden diptych, no Cézanne bathers, no Duchamp readymades. Instead, lots of antiquities. Put the two collections under one roof and you’d have something like the Met.
I’m not going to write about all of the departments. Actually I liked the Chinese gallery so much that I’m tempted not to write about the others. It’s housed in the 1915 Harrison Rotunda, which is smaller than the Pantheon in Rome but big enough to take your breath away, ninety feet from the floor to the top of the dome.2 Everything you look at has eighty-plus feet of open space above it. And like the Pantheon, it’s well-concealed from without. When I snapped the picture below from the far side of the koi pond at the entrance I wouldn’t have guessed what a vast space I’d find inside, though now that I know what I’m looking at I see a bit of the rotunda’s exterior on the left.
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It’s not just Saluzi and Quanmaogua, the gallery is full of objects the museum bought from Loo. Three ceramic camels, statue bases with reliefs and inscriptions, a smiling Buddha of gilded wood with his chin on his knee. But my second-favorite objects in the room after the horses were a later acquisition, a pair of cloisonné guardian lions from the Qing dynasty. The Qing dynasty is one of the longer ones, it runs from the conquest of China by Manchus in 1644 all the way to 1911, so I should be more specific—the museum dates them to the 17th century. There were no lions in China then, nor have there ever been any, aside from the occasional diplomatic gift from Persia. According to the wall labels for these two, the Chinese guardian lion is part tiger and part Pekinese pug, the fusion of two native species creating a version of the third known through legend and traveler’s tales. In English they’re sometimes called foo dogs. The cloisonné is unusual for a pair on this scale, but otherwise the lions follow the standard pattern. The male has his paw on a sphere to imply dominance; the female rests hers on a cub, who grips back. Cute.
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The lions were given to the museum in 1963 by the Salada Tea Company. Salada is a Canadian firm, today a subsidiary of Lipton, that for much of the twentieth century was one of the biggest names in tea in North America. Their 1917 US headquarters at Berkeley and Stuart Streets in Boston, today the site of Liberty Mutual, is famous for Henry Wilson’s set of bronze doors with reliefs of the history of the cultivation and trade of tea. The lions were upstairs, as can be seen in a 1920 photograph by Nathaniel L. Stibbins. How they got there, why Salada gave them to the Penn Museum four decades later, and what happened to the other objects seen in the picture—perhaps answerable questions if there’s a Salada archive somewhere.
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More obvious as a museum highlight than the Tang horses and the Qing lions, the The Granite Sphinx of Ramses II, just beyond the admissions desk, is the biggest sphinx in the Americas, and the fourth biggest outside of Egypt, after the Great Sphinx of Tanis at the Louvre and the pair of sphinxes on Universitetskaya Embankment in St. Petersburg. It was brought to Philadelphia in 1913 after being unearthed at Memphis the year before.3 Photos taken at the time recall earlier, more famous ones of the arrival of Cleopatra’s Needle in New York in 1881. Doubtless, in the hierarchy of ancient wonders, a two hundred-ton obelisk trumps a thirteen-ton sphinx, but the Penn Museum has made better use of the sphinx than New York City has made of the obelisk, which ended up behind the Met in a quiet corner of Central Park called Greywacke Knoll. I wonder how many New Yorkers even know it’s there.
Ramses II ruled for sixty-six years in the thirteenth century BC. He was a warrior, retaking lands that had been lost to the Hittites and the Nubians; a progenitor, father to a hundred children; and a builder of temples and monuments on a scale not seen in Egypt since the age of the great pyramids a thousand years before. The term spolia, used to describe elements taken from one building or monument for use in another, is most often associated with the Classical and post-Classical world—famous examples include the marble columns in the hypostyle hall of the Great Mosque of Kairouan and the porphyry tetrarchs on the façade of St. Mark’s Basilica—but this kind of recycling was also common in Egypt. Before the Penn sphinx portrayed Ramses II it portrayed another king from about seven centuries earlier, but exactly which one is unknown; all the earlier inscriptions were removed.
That Ramses II practiced this kind of repurposing may have implications for readers of English literature, who know him by his Greek name, Ozymandias. Would it diminish this king of kings if the shattered visage Shelley’s traveler found in the desert, beside the two vast and trunkless legs of stone, was not modeled on the face of Ozymandias himself, but on some other unknown potentate, and that only the famous inscription is properly Ozymandian? Was Ozymandias a pragmatist, an improviser, a scheming borrower of the grandeur of his ancestors? Would that make him more human, and less fit a subject for Shelley’s musing on tyranny and time? I’m not sure. But it’s a pity the face of the Penn sphinx has worn away; we can only imagine the wrinkled lip and the sneer of cold command.
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Aside from the sphinx, a few other objects here and there, and one hall with visible storage, the rest of the Egyptian collection is off view while the galleries are closed for renovation. A teaser clip for the new installation promises “a particularly immersive and in-depth experience where people can gain a full appreciation for the wonders of Ancient Egypt.” This doesn’t sound like an art museum, but of course the Penn Museum is only in part an art museum, it’s also pedagogical, archaeological. Some galleries feel crammed with objects and didactic panels; in others there are distracting television screens; and in one case a video projected onto the floor is accompanied by a recording set on repeat. Growing up in the DC suburbs, I spent countless hours in the Smithsonian, especially in the museums of natural and American history. The Penn Museum has as much in common with those institutions as it does with a place like the Met. This was mostly fine with me. I skipped the room with the video projection but enjoyed reading about Sicilian numismatics and Sumerian medical tablets.
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I can’t always predict what the undergrads in my survey courses will take an interest in, and what will put them to sleep, but the damnatio memoriae usually holds their attention. The term, I’ve just realized, is not ancient but modern. It was coined in Leipzig in 1689 to describe the Roman practice of obliterating the memory of a recently deceased emperor, sometimes after official condemnation by the Roman Senate. To introduce the concept I show them Stalin by the Moscow Canal, with and without Nikolai Yezhov, and then move on to the Severan Tondo, from which Emperor Geta was removed. Now that I’ve been to the Penn Museum I will add Domitian.
He was the third and last of the Flavians, Rome’s second imperial dynasty, after the Julio-Claudians. He’s also the last of the Twelve Caesars of Suetonius. Domitian was a fairly competent administrator and military commander during his fifteen years as emperor, but he was tyrannical, and an implacable enemy and persecutor of the senate. He executed more than twenty senators before being assassinated in 96 AD. The condemnation of his memory was passed almost immediately after the accession of his successor Nerva, a longtime imperial advisor. Domitian’s coins were melted down, his statues demolished, and his records purged.
One of the targeted objects was a commemorative marble panel with an eleven-line inscription. The Penn Museum purchased it in 1910. On first glance the text seems thoroughly scratched out, like a redacted portion of an FOIA document, but keep looking and you’ll make out a few letters. Based on the parts that can be read, it’s thought that the panel was made to celebrate the construction of a road at Puteoli (today Pozzuoli, a small city west of Naples).
As noted above, the Romans, like Ramses/Ozymandias, were resourceful. A marble panel bearing a desecrated inscription was still a marble panel. During the reign of Nerva’s successor, Trajan, the reverse side was used as part of a triumphal arch, also in Puteoli, celebrating recent military accomplishments. Three soldiers are carved in relief on the panel (a fourth soldier survives on another panel in the Berlin Antikensammlung). The soldiers can be identified, thanks to a scorpion on the shield one of them holds, as belonging to the Praetorian Guard, the elite among Roman soldiers. The scorpion was a reference to the birth sign of Tiberius, who was fondly remembered by the guard.
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Seeing it there made me wonder about scorpions in Western art. I couldn’t think of any, but the scorpion is not an exotic creature in Europe, like the lion is in China. They’re fairly common in all of the Mediterranean countries, as my online search confirmed in an amusing fashion (scorpion found in lake como airbnb; We are renting a house in the Cortona region in March… one article says they enjoy getting to beds… I seriously don’t know whether to cancel, or not; First time in Italy, just caught this scorpion in my airbnb. Is it dangerous? Are there more?).
In fact, I now realize, there are quite a few scorpions in Western art. There’s a piece of scorpion jewelry in Raphael’s Portrait of Elisabetta Gonzaga, and there’s one fighting a snake in an illumination in an eleventh century Anglo-Saxon herbal. And of course there are astrological scorpions, like the one on the heavenly globe in Guercino’s Atlas Holding up the Celestial Heavens. They also turn up in images of desert saints, especially at the feet of Jerome, as seen in a fifteenth century relief by Francesco di Giorgio Martini, and in paintings from the same century by Domenico di Michelino, Sano di Pietro and Fra Angelico. Harmless creatures, by the way. Scorpions do kill a few thousand people per year, but not in Italy. Don’t back out of that trip to Umbria.
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It occurs to me that I’ve spent the better part of this essay either off on tangents or discussing highlights acquired in the standard fashion for museums, that is, through purchase or gift. This has been a little misleading, since so much of the collection consists of objects dug out of the ground by Penn archaeologists. So I will close with four bowls that were found in the first such venture, the 1888 Penn expedition to Nippur in Mesopotamia.
In an art history survey class Mesopotamia comes up right away. First the city states, and then the empires. Uruk, Ur, Lagash, Assyria, Babylon. Votive offerings, ziggurats, statues of Gudea, steles, cylinder seals, entryways flanked by lamassu. Then, in 539 BC, the neo-Babylonians are conquered, their territory is absorbed into Achaemenid Persia, and the region is not heard of again until you get to the golden age of Baghdad and the Abbasid Caliphate thirteen hundred years later. I’d never given a thought to the intervening years until I saw the Penn Museum’s incantation bowls from Nippur, dated 400 to 800 AD. This means they were made either in Sassanid times or in the first years after the Muslim conquest of the region. They’re thin, fragile things, and would seem unlikely survivors, but the opposite is true—their preservation can be ascribed to the most obvious of reasons. I always tell my students, if you want something to survive far into the future, bury it. Grave goods have an outsized role in ancient art history not because they were the most important objects to the societies that buried them, but because we find them. Likewise, if not for the eruption of Vesuvius, Pompeii would matter no more to us than Puteoli.
Incantation bowls, made to thwart demons and curses, were not placed in tombs but buried under floors in houses, usually face down, by doorways or room corners. It’s thought that doorways and corners were held to be vulnerable to demonic infiltration, but why an upside down incantation bowl was held to be the solution to this problem is unclear. Maybe it just worked.
Thanks to the Nippur excavations, Penn has one of the best collections of these bowls. The majority have texts written in ink in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, one of a number of dialects of Aramaic used in Mesopotamia at the time. A few (and these are the natural candidates for display) also have one or more figures at center. They would have been made by Jewish scribes, though not necessarily for Jewish clients. Christians, Mandeans and Manicheans also used these bowls. They are important documents in Jewish studies because while Jewish Babylonian Aramaic is the original language of the Talmud, the Talmud is known through later copies. The bowl inscriptions are the principal surviving epigraphic sources in the language. There are also fraudulent bowls, with text-like patterns in what is known as pseudo-script, presumably made by sham scribes to dupe illiterate clients.
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Three of the four figures pictured in the bowls above are chained at the feet and thought to represent demons. The fourth, who accompanies one of the chained creatures, could be a sorcerer. As for the texts, according to a 1910 article by Hebrew and Aramaic scholar J. A. Montgomery (who three years later published a book-length study of the bowls), they do not make for lively reading.
The inscriptions are tiresome repetitions of the names of the evil spirits and of the formulas which are efficacious to bar them. They are of interest to the philologist as original documents of interesting dialects. The student of religion finds in them clues connecting the syncretistic faiths of the Babylonia of about 500 AD with their earlier sources. They cannot be said to be of general interest.
But don’t take Montgomery’s word for it. The museum provides a sample with the display.
…If you harm Abuna bar Garibta and Bayba bar Yawitay, I shall put a spell of the sea and a spell of the sea snake Leviathan upon you. If you harm Abuna bar Garibta and his spouse and his children, I shall bend you like a bow and span you like a bowstring. Again, (if) you do some harm to the house of Papaq and his possessions and his household, I Abuna bar Garibta or Bayba bar Yawitay, shall put a ban, a decree and an anathema upon you with my own doing which were (already) put upon Mount Hermon, the sea snake Leviathan, and Sodom and Gomorrhah…
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Finally, the shop. There are lots of old museum publications on offer at modest prices, but none of these caught my eye. Instead I bought some archaeology postcards.
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The life of the secretive Loo was shrouded in mystery until 2013, when Géraldine Lenain, former director of Asian Art at Christie’s, published Monsieur Loo: le roman d'un marchand d'art asiatique. She discussed the life of “the most important Asian art dealer ever… [a man who] lied for fifty years to everybody, his loved ones, his partners, his colleagues, his clients” in a talk at the Hong Kong Asia Society on May 26, 2014. I recommend it in the strongest possible terms.
I seem not to have been the only one to have this reaction. There were reports that when Jiang Zemin saw the horses during his 1997 state visit, the Chinese delegation was “thrilled” with the rortunda.
The story of the sphinx, with many archival photos from the excavation at Memphis and the journey to Philadelphia, was told by Josef Wegner in a lecture given at the Penn Museum on October 19, 2013.
Quite a romp through the Penn Museum collection. There's a typo in the paragraph near the end that starts "Incantation bowls." Looks like you changed something without deleting what was no longer necessary.
There were so many comments I could have made while reading it but then of course forget them.
The bowls looked familiar. Did you post them on IG? They remind me a bit of the Islamic bowls with their sayings, but those are for eating & then one gets to discover the piece of advice after all the food is gone.
Marvellous. I love museum visits, even someone else's. On the subject of C.T. Loo, I sought out his famous house in Paris in 2018 and took some photos of the striking exterior. Unfortunately, the interior can't be visited unless you get yourself invited to a function that it's been rented for. It must have been something to see when it functioned as his home and gallery. Thanks for the tip on Lenain's book; I'll look for it.