The ding, a three-legged ritual vessel whose origins predate the legends and cloudy early history of the Shang dynasty (about 1600-1023 B.C.), was used to hold food offered to ancestral spirits. The ding was also a ground ornament. Fantastic creatures, symbols, even written characters recording ritual procedures were cast into its surface.
In its typical Shang form the ding was a sturdy, lidless vessel mounted on straight legs. Contact with other cultures introduced new elements in its shape and ornament as well as new uses. By the time of the Eastern Zhou dynasty (771-256 B.C.) the ding had acquired the refined form in which it appears here. It had also been secularized; although the Shang tradition of burying bronzes with the dead continued, they were also presented as state gifts to foreign rulers and preserved and handed down as symbols of family honor and status.
The Lidow ding is related stylistically to a cache of fine bronzes discovered near the village of Liyu (northern Shanxi province) in 1932. It exemplifies the high level of bronze casting attained by Eastern Zhou metalsmiths despite the anarchy and constant warfare that plagued the period. The animal forms of an earlier era have become finely stylized and abstracted; an interlace of zoomorphic and geometric elements covers the entire surface of the ding's body and lid. The curvilinear pattern in an overlapping two-layer relief contains forms suggestive of rams, birds, and felines. Restless spirals, S-curves, triangles, and scales are composed in ribbonlike bands. On the "knee" of each cabriole leg is an inlaid animal mask, an image from earlier ding forms.
