Bottle with vegetal scrolls, late 13th century. Jingdezhen Qingbai porcelain; height 31.4 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1923; 23.182.1. Public Domain.
Almost the entire body of this bottle is covered in curling foliage. Yet in a small photograph, the first impression is of a pale, rounded vessel. Enlarge the image and the carving begins to take over: broad loops, tightly curled tips and small leaves tucked between them.
This is a late-thirteenth-century bottle from Jingdezhen, now in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its decoration is incised and carved beneath a bluish glaze, rather than outlined in paint. It belongs to the family of porcelain called Qingbai, or bluish-white ware.
Follow One Curl
Start with the large inward curl on the left, just below the middle of the bottle. A broad line sweeps around it, then opens into a cluster of rounded leaf tips. Smaller curls occupy the gaps. There is very little untouched space, but the larger loops give the eye a route through the detail.
Some lines are narrow and sharply drawn; others form wider channels. In the museum photograph, these channels look cooler and darker than the pale surfaces beside them. A leaf becomes legible through its edges and the slight changes in level. The glaze allows those differences to remain visible.
Along the left edge, the pattern slips out of sight as the wall curves away. The photograph gives us one face of an ornament that continues around the bottle. A straight-on view makes the center easy to read, but leaves the next turn of the scroll hidden.
Jingdezhen Before Blue-and-White
Jingdezhen's history is often approached through painted blue-and-white porcelain. Qingbai offers an earlier starting point. The Met's account of early Qingbai production places these pale-glazed wares before the city's flourishing blue-and-white production in the fourteenth century.
This bottle belongs to that older tradition, though it comes late in the thirteenth century. Here, much of the visual interest has already been worked into the porcelain beneath the glaze. Looking closely at the cut lines helps put carving alongside painting when thinking about Jingdezhen's decoration.
For the overlapping names used for this glaze family, our Qingbai and Yingqing guide explains the terminology. The city's wider story belongs to our Jingdezhen Heritage page.
Where the Pattern Stops
Pull back from the detail and look at the outline again. The short neck is remarkably small against the rounded shoulders. Below them, the sides draw steadily inward toward the foot. The carving continues across that narrowing body, so the large curls seem more tightly gathered near the bottom.
We tend to notice the plain neck only after spending time among the leaves. It gives the crowded body a clean stopping point. Follow the decoration up over the shoulder: just below the mouth, the curls give way to a small, smooth collar.
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