Catalogue entry no. 304 by Max Loehr:
304 Arch-shaped Pendant
Semicircular disk segment of jade, originally dark green, but now largely discolored and opaque. The slight indentations in the contour of one end of the segment defining the head, horns, and lower jaw of the dragon compare with Nos. 299 and 300. Apparently some of the engraved features of this head—the mouth if nothing more—as well as the front line of the foreleg and the paw are of late Shang or early Western Chou date. The rest of the engraved lines, however, are a later addition; these lines depict the dragons’ horns, scaly body, hindlegs, and curled-up tail. The area at the opposite end of the segment, which in pieces of this type was reserved for the tail or left as a blank area extending beyond the tail, is here made to resemble a second dragon head, which is deprived of a body. The rawness of these engraved lines might not by itself serve as a criterion sufficient for rejecting them as original, for such harshness is not entirely unknown in authentic pieces of this period. More compelling is the fact that the Shang or Western Chou artists conceived of such tiger segments as two-dimensional projections of dragons with the animal organically filling, and thus congruent to, the outline of the segment. In the present piece, by contrast, the segment is conceived of more as a flat tablet upon which the dragon is merely “written.” The result is that the outline of the dragon’s body is not congruent with the outline of the piece; the line of his back, for instance, is incised an eighth of an inch from the edge The sense of organic unity is thereby lost, and various awkward filling devices, such as the concentric triangles between the base of the tail and its tip, are required to fill the resulting vacant areas. Several other meaningless or anachronistic patterns are further indications of tampering. The originally fine Shang or Early Western Chou piece was disfigured by a later hand, although not necessarily a recent one.
