The questions addressed in this article concern foundries, designers, and artistic creation in the Zhou period. First foundry debris and the location of bronze workshops are briefly reviewed. Their growing size in association with the early development of a “market” suggests that patrons may have been less influential in the Warring States period than before, when workshops were located close to the palace and worked mainly for the court. The chronology of the Zhou ritual vessels reveals a very slow artistic evolution.The main factors that may help to explain why significant changes in the development of bronze ritual art did not occur very often are reviewed. It appears that during this development, the ritual vessels that were mostly representative of the owner's status like the ding and gui vessels rarely departed from conventional models. However these two types of vessels were inscribed more often than any other types. By contrast, ever since the late Shang period, the vessels which were most innovative on an artistic level, such as gong 觥 and he 盉 ewers, belonged to the water container category. A hierarchy existed among the bronzes, therefore, which was expressed either by their number (when they belonged to series like the ding tripods) and by the presence or absence of an inscription, or by their décor through the contrast between simplicity and originality, not to say eccentricity, as in the case of the water ewers. Whereas the former expressed status or rank, the latter seem to have been more related to personal choices by the patrons as an expression of wealth. Indeed, this article shows that some bronze types were more prone than others to stimulate artistic innovation. The last part of the article tries to identify one particularly innovative workshop, and to determine specific motifs and decoration techniques that may reveal the individual imprint of a bronze designer, or more broadly of a workshop.