The object speaks column of Art History by Marilyn Stokstad may be a good example as a base to write an authentication report of Chinese antique jade object.

Here we would like to use the Shang Dynasty Jade Tiger as an example to write an authentication report.   THE OBJECT SPEAKS  LARGE PLANE TREES  ” Language in which the marks of the artist (the lines and colors) replace words as signs. In the 1960s and 1970s, structuralism evolved into other critical tools to determine what a painting may have to say, such as semiotics (the theory of signs and symbols) and deconstruction. 

To the semiologist, Large Plane Trees are an arrangement of colored marks on the canvas. To decode the message, the critic is not concerned with the artist‘s meaning or intention but rather with the “signs” van Gogh used. The “correct” interpretation is no longer of interest. Similarly, the deconstructionism of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (b. 1930) questions all assumptions and frees the viewer from the search for a single, correct interpretation. So many interpretations emerge from the creative interaction between the viewer and the work of art that in the end the artwork is “deconstructed.” 

Today, critics and art historians have begun to reconsider artworks as tangible objects. Many have turned their attention from pure theory to a contextual or social history of art. Some have even taken up connoisseurship again. 

The existence of so many approaches to a work of art may lead us to the conclusion that any idea or opinion is equally valid. But art historians, regardless of their theoretical stance, would argue that the informed mind and eye are absolutely necessary. The creation of works of art remains a uniquely human activity, and knowledge of the history of art is essential if art is to truly speak to us.

In Vincent van Gogh‘s Large Plane Trees, huge trees upward from an undulating earth as tiny men labor to repair a street in the southern French town of Saint–Rémy. The painting depicts an ordinary scene in an ordinary little town. Although the canvas is unsigned, stylistic and technical analysis confirms its attribution to the Post–Impressionist master Vincent van Gogh (1853–90). Large Plane Trees now hangs in The Cleveland Museum of Art Museum curators, who study and care for works of art, have analyzed their physical condition and formed opinions about their quality. They have also traced its provenance (the history of its ownership) from the time the painting left the artist‘s studio until the day it entered their collection. 

What Large Plane Trees says to us depends upon who we are. Art historians and art critics looking at this painting from the perspectives of their own specialties and approaches to the study of art’s history can and do see many different meanings. Thus, this art object speaks in various ways. 

Art historians steeped in the work of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)—whose psychoanalytic theory addresses creativity, the unconscious mind, and art as an expression of repressed feelings—will find in this painting images infused with psychoanalytic meaning. The painting, despite its light, bright colors, might seem to suggest something ominous in the uneasy relationship between the looming trees and tiny people.

   In contrast to Freud‘s search into the individual psyche, the political philosopher Karl Marx (1818–83) saw human beings as products of their economic environment. Marxist art critics might see van Gogh‘s life and art as a reflection of Marx‘s critique of humanity‘s over-concern with material values: van Gogh worked early in his life as a lay minister, identified with the underclass, and never achieved material success. This painting might also speak to such art critics of the economic structures that transform an unsalable nineteenth–century painting into a twentieth–century status symbol for the wealthy elite. Works of art can also be approached from a purely theoretical point of view. Early in the twentieth century, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) developed the structuralist theory, which defines language as a system of arbitrary signs. ” Here we use Shang Dynasty, tiger, as an example, the aspects of jade’s authentication are as follows:

• Material Composition: Refractive index: 1.606 tested by GIA Duplex Refractometer
• Form and Carving Styles: The object is carved in the form of a  stretching tiger creeping on the ground. The carving style is a convex line forming from double-incised lines.
• Antiquity Authentication: Antiquity evidence includes dissolved pits, cleaving veins, and diffusive markings.
• Period: Shang Dynasty.
• Measurements: L. 17cm, W.3.5cm, 620 grams.
• Motifs identified: motifs characterizing the Shang Dynasty including big eyes, mushroom-style ears which inherited the style of the pillar on the edge of the wine cup, bared wire weapons, and shields are weapons.
• Iconology Elements: form, motif, perspective.