A LARGE PALE GREEN AND RUSSET JADE DOUBLE DRAGON PENDANT, HUANG, EARLY WESTERN HAN

A LARGE PALE GREEN AND RUSSET JADE ‘DOUBLE DRAGON’ PENDANT, HUANG, EARLY WESTERN HAN China, 2nd century BC. The elegantly curved huang with a stylized dragon head to either end. The mostly translucent stone of a sea-green tone with cloudy white and russet inclusions and shadings. Pierced for suspension. Provenance: The Collection of Irene and Wolfgang Zacke. The couple has been active in the art trade for well over half a century and were one of the first in Austria to offer Asian works of art for sale, starting in 1968. Since the late 1980s, they have been collecting ancient Chinese jades, building an extensive collection over the decades. Condition: Very good condition with old wear, signs of weathering, minuscule nibbling to edges, shallow surface scratches and other traces of use, minor erosion. Weight: 227.6 g Dimensions: Length 33.5 cm The surface is densely covered with small and slightly raised hexagons, a pattern called pu, or ‘cat tail’. During the Han dynasty, this motif was mostly used to decorate large funerary discs with carved masks. The squarish indentations carved on the border at the extremities of the ornaments evoke the stylized features of two dragon heads in profile: the chin, mouth, snout, and horns. Literature comparison: Three related huang carved with patterns of small, raised curls and hexagons were excavated from the princely tombs at Shizishan (Xuzhou, Jiangsu) between 1994 and 1995. Similar huang with jagged profiles but decorated with spirals and dated to the late Eastern Zhou period, are in the National Museum of History, Taiwan, and in the Samuel and Myrna Myers collection. Compare also with a very similar, yet significantly smaller pair in F. Salviati, 4000 Years of Chinese Archaic Jades, Edition Zacke, Vienna 2017, no. 285. Auction result comparison: Compare with a related jade huang, of significantly smaller size and dated to the Eastern Zhou dynasty, at Sotheby’s New York in Fine Chinese Ceramics & Works of Art on 18-19 March 2014, lot 151, bought-in at an estimate of USD 10,000-15,000 . 西漢早期大型青玉帶沁雙龍紋璜 中國，公元前二世紀。弧形，典雅的黃褐色，兩端龍首，總體海綠色，半透明的玉石，帶有絮狀物和赤褐色的內含物。 穿孔。 来源： Irene 與Wolfgang Zacke收藏。這對夫妻一直活躍於藝術品行業已有半個多世紀，自1968年起他們開始在奧地利經營亞洲藝術品，是最早的商人之一。自1980年代後期以來，他們一直在收集中國古玉，數十年來建立了一個大規模的收藏。 圖片： Irene Zacke 與 Prof. Filippo Salviati教授 品相： 狀況良好，有舊磨損，風化，細微的邊緣磕損，表面淺划痕和使用痕跡，輕微腐蝕。 重量：227.6 克 尺寸：長33.5 厘米 拍賣結果比較：一件相近的東周玉璜，尺寸更小，見紐約蘇富比 Fine Chinese Ceramics & Works of Art 拍場2014年3月18-19日lot 151, 估價 USD 10,000-15,000 .