'Zhenmushou'

An imposing statue of a fantastic creature with a feline snout, long horns and wings, squatting on its haunches on a high base. It has a massive, square head, with a huge gaping mouth, bared teeth and square eyes. Two additional teeth can be seen along its upper lip, on either side of its wide, flat, three-lobed nose. Beneath its chin, a long beard stands out in relief on the chest; the sides of the head, face and neck are framed by a sort of mane consisting of two rigid crests marked with a series of parallel grooves. Two very long, wavy horns are grafted on the forehead, reminiscent of those of an Impala (African herbivore). The lower half of these is adorned by a row of horny protuberances and a short branch. This structure, significant by itself, is made even more imposing by a large branched crest motif rising from the back of the zhenmushou’s neck, like a five-pointed flame (huoyan). This has been cold painted in orange and is the only part of the statue that is not glazed. The glaze is cream and green on the horns, dark amber on the mane and jaws, and mainly green on the snout. The right eye is mottled brown and the left cream coloured. The massive body, with a protruding chest and concave abdomen, rests on its hind legs, barely outlined, and rises up on powerful front legs, with shaped knees and knuckles, terminating in bovine hooves. The forearms are streamlined. The mould line where the legs were joined to the rest of the body can be clearly seen beneath the glaze. A pair of fairly slender wings rises frontally from the creature’s shoulders: six pointed appendices, grooved in the centre, branch out and curve upwards from an oblong supporting surface with an irregular shape and a border marked in bas-relief, similar in appearance to armour. These “feathers” are glazed green, while the three-coloured marbling (green, amber and cream) on the rest of each wing runs down the cream-white legs to the green claws and base. With the exception of a large creamy yellow stripe from the neck to the abdomen, the rest of the zhenmushou’s body is glazed brown. The beast rests on a high base with an irregular shape, flat at the front and semi-circular at the back, with an expanded upper edge and four lateral holes. The surface of the pedestal, marbled in three colours, is grooved at the front by thin and apparently random mixtilinear marks. The glazing on the statue is very shiny and oily.
The leonine appearance of this protective creature perhaps alludes, together with the recurring flame motifs on the wings, mane, crest, etc., to Buddhist beliefs. Lions with unusual appearances, reminiscent of this statue, are found, for example, in Tang Dynasty sculpture in Longmen.
Statues of this type, featuring sancai glazing, are typical of funeral artefacts from Henan and are mainly found in Tang tombs in the capital Luoyang. However, similar examples, with animal snouts, are different in size.