Bronze tripod incense burner with Arabic script

Bronze tripod incense burner with Arabic script.

The waisted and rounded body rising to a flattened rim with raised everted rim, the exterior cast in relief with three shaped cartouches of Arabic invocations on stippled grounds, the heavily cast vessel of reddish-brown patina, the underside with a six-character Zhengde mark on a stippled ground and a rectangular reserve.

China: Zhengde six-character mark-and-period (1506–21).

The Arabic script may be translated as:
‘The best invocation to God is: There is no God but God, Mohammed is the prophet of God’.

Provenance: Private English collection.

For an almost identical Zhengde mark-and-period bronze censer see Knapton Rasti Asian Art, 2001, no. 41; a cylindrical-form censer of the same period in Knapton Rasti Asian Art, Works of Art, November 2007, pp. 86-7, no. 55; another Zhengde mark-and-period cylindrical censer in Knapton Rasti Asian Art, November 2010, no. 79; a further example in Sydney L. Moss Ltd., Emperor Scholar Artisan Monk: The Creative Personality in Chinese Works of Art, 1984, pp. 264-5, no. 118; and one in Hung and Chern, Chinese Incense Burners, Collection of Steven Hung and Lindy Chern, p. 103, plate 72.

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Price on application

This object is eligible for a Certificate of BADA Provenance