) decoration was effected by carving with an iron graving-tool on the body while it was still soft. And so, too, with the openwork (ling lung), which has already been described.[234] All these processes were in use in one form or another from the earliest reigns of the Ming dynasty, and some of them, at any rate, have been encountered on the Sung wares. High reliefs, such as the figures on the bowls described on p. [74], would be separately modelled and “luted” on by means of liquid clay; and, as already noted, these reliefs were often left in the biscuit state, though at times we find them covered with coloured glazes. It is hardly necessary to add that the same processes were applied to pottery, and that the reliefs took many other forms besides figures, e.g. dragon designs, foliage, scrollwork, symbols, etc.
PLATE 85
Vase with crackled greenish grey glaze coated on the exterior with transparent apple green enamel: the base unglazed. Probably sixteenth century.
Height 14 inches.
British Museum.
The crackled glazes of the Sung period were still made, though the Ming tendency was to substitute painted decoration for monochrome; and we have already noted the crackled blue and lavender in which a second glaze is added to a grey white crackle. This process is particularly noticeable in the “apple green” monochromes (Plate [85]), both of the Ming and Ch’ing dynasties, in which a green overglaze itself uncrackled is washed on to a crackled stone grey porcelain. The green is often carried down over the slightly browned biscuit of the foot rim, forming a band of brown. But this, so far from being a peculiarity of the Ming technique, is much more conspicuous on the porcelains of the early eighteenth century, when it was the constant practice to dress the foot rim of the crackled wares with a brown ferruginous earth in imitation of the “iron foot” of their Sung prototypes.
The work at the Imperial factory[235] was divided between twenty-three departments, nine of which were occupied with accessories, such as the making of ropes and barrels, general carpentry, and even boat building. Five separate departments were employed in making the large bowls, the wine cups, the plates, the large round dishes, and the tea cups; another in preparing the “paste” or body material, and another in making the “seggars” or fireclay cases in which the ware was packed in the kiln. Five more were occupied in the details of decoration, viz. the mark and seal department, the department for engraving designs, the department for sketching designs, the department for writing, and the department for colouring.
It does not appear that the work of decoration was so minutely subdivided in the Ming period as in later times, when we are told that a piece of porcelain might pass through more than seventy hands; but it is clear, at least, that the outlining and filling in of the designs were conducted in separate sheds. This is, indeed, self-apparent from the Ming blue and white porcelains, the designs of which are characterised by strong and clear outlines filled in with flat washes of colour.