Birdcage vase

Birdcage vases are among the best known porcelains in the Dresden collection because of their rarity and unusual shape. The unusual, even bizarre, shape of the vase is an extremely rare combination of various different materials and formal elements, such as the archaic elephant handle and the playfulness of the birdcage. It is not quite clear where the Japanese potters got the inspiration for the combination of these heterogeneous elements form, or whether there are Japanese antecedents of such a form. The vases were presumably produced for export to Europe.