Ritual wine vessel (lei)

Bronze Decoration of the Western Zhou Period

There was a riot of new types of decoration at the beginning of the Western Zhou period, as the leaders attempted to find their own artistic and ritual vocabulary. The pieces in this case show various solutions to these issues. Some are heavily ornamented with taotie (a kind of mythical animal) masks, dragons, birds, and large, heavy flanges; others have no surface decoration. It is hard to imagine that these pieces were made at approximately the same time by the same culture.