S925 Silver Taotie Beast Face Hand Plaque

Taotie is the name Song scholars gave to a kind of animal-mask motif on bronzes. The Annals of Lü Buwei says the Zhou cauldrons bore taotie, heads without bodies, which ate people and, unable to swallow, destroyed themselves first. Seen today, the symmetrical face-only patterns on Shang and Zhou vessels are not necessarily taotie at all, but the name stuck and rolls off the tongue more easily than animal-mask motif. The motif appears from the Erligang period and runs to the middle of the Western Zhou, several hundred years in all.

The composition is highly geometric: a ridge down the centre for the nose, symmetrical eyes either side, horns above the eyes, ears below the horns, and beyond them the body reduced to a pair of hooks. Once the eye is accustomed it reads as a face, but look closely and every stroke grows out of the structure of the vessel — the form comes first and the pattern after, and the order can't be reversed. Symmetry is the floor for this kind of motif; a hair off on one side and the whole face is crooked.

This one is a single wrist plate in silver, high relief on the front and flat at the back. A plate sits against the outer wrist bone and stays put better than a strand of round beads, which rotate and carry the pattern round to the inside of the wrist. Single plate means there is one on the strand and you choose the rest: plain beads hold it better than carved ones, and with carved beads every element becomes a focal point. The width should roughly match the wrist; any wider and it catches on the wrist bone.

On high relief the raised areas polish bright first and the recesses darken first, so with wear the contrast widens and the mask grows clearer. That is the virtue of silver: age doesn't make it ugly. The edges are chamfered and won't cut. Use a flat cord, because a round one spins inside a square hole, and once it turns the pattern sits crooked and has to be restrung. The flat back sits comfortably against skin, and a mark or inscription can go there without taking up the front.

Today taotie is usually glossed as gluttony, an extension of that line in the Annals of Lü Buwei. What the Shang and Zhou themselves made of the motif is unsettled — some say a medium to the sky, some a warning. Wearing it needn't carry a burden of meaning; looking right is enough. A silver plate develops a slight curve over time, bending to the wrist, and that is normal deformation. Take it off to wash your hands: soap left in the crevices dulls it over the months.