The Empty Cartouche and the Unfinished Pearl: Incomplete Monuments and the Agency of Buddhist Merit-making in Sixth-century China

The patrons of early medieval Chinese Buddhism commissioned thousands of votive images and monuments, many including inscriptions justifying their gift and even donor figures depicting them in the act of offering worship. Yet many such monuments include figures with empty cartouches, or lists of names with obvious lacunae. The representation of the specific patron in image and/or inscription is clearly important to the merit-making exercise of image patronage, yet frequently such images and lists include space for names that apparently were never added. Images whose carving is unfinished are considerably rarer, but these too occasionally survive. As monuments, they are incomplete, but they were installed and dedicated nonetheless, and must have possessed some degree of religious efficacy despite their unfinished state. These two forms of incompleteness draw our attention to the two principal actors in the production of sixth-century Buddhist monuments: the patron and the artisan. Where inscriptions often elide the role of the artisan completely, the unfinished carving makes visible his response to the patron’s commission, and where donor figures with inscribed cartouches imply a full complement of patrons, the occasional uninscribed figure calls our attention to both the presence and absence of patrons in a collective donation. This paper will examine an incomplete stele of Northern Qi date in the Victoria and Albert Museum collection as a point of departure for investigating questions of agency, patronage, and religious efficacy in the production of sixth-century monuments.