Catalogue entry no. 524 by Max Loehr:
524 Bronze Mirror with Jade and Glass Décor
The bronze disk, whose once shiny, silvery reflecting face is now covered with a rough, variegated green crust of oxide, is decorated in a striking and unusual manner. In the center of three surrounding zones sits a convex knob of intense dark blue and white glass beads, with a circular stratified eye in the middle and six eccentric eyes moving in counter-clockwise fashion around it. The next zone is a flat, plain, largely discolored jade disk bounded by a narrow ring of gold. Then follows a wider disk consisting of less brilliant blue and white eye-beads set flush into a bed of glass paste of dull blue color; these eye-beads conform to a distinct pattern: six pairs of compound eyes in radial position define as many sectors between them; each of the sectors is filled with three eccentric eyes in triangular arrangement, suggesting a clockwise motion. The outer zone is a fluted and twisted “rope” ring of mottled pale green and yellowish, highly polished jade, the perimeter of which is encrusted with bronze oxide. The mirror is said to have come from Chin-ts’un, Lo-yang. Late Eastern Chou.
Seligman and Beck, while regarding this mirror as “the finest example know to date of the Chinese workers’ skill in applying polychrome glass decoration to metal,” expressed doubts as to whether the fluted jade ring was contemporary with, and from the beginning affixed to, the mirror. “Rope” rings of this kind were, however, current in late Eastern Chou, and the assemblage appears to be ancient.
