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Imperial Illusions. Kristina Kleutghen
Читать онлайн.Название Imperial Illusions
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isbn 9780295805528
Автор произведения Kristina Kleutghen
Серия Art History Publication Initiative Books
Издательство Ingram
Beyond the foreign novelty of these images, the original Christian symbolism and evangelical intentions behind them were largely lost on their Chinese audiences, who
1.5Giulio Aleni, S.J., “Washing the Feet of the Disciples at the Last Supper.” From Illustrated Explanation of the Incarnation of the Lord of Heaven, 1637, fol. 22 (seq. 45). Woodblock print. Houghton Library, Harvard University, 52-1049.
were unfamiliar with the Christian texts and generally uninterested in conversion. It has been argued that Jesuit mission images can be broken down into “the semiotics of the subject matter and the semiotics of technique,”51 but there is neither visual nor textual evidence that content was separated from style in the minds of the Chinese viewers. On the contrary, the presence of four Christian images (provided by Ricci) in Cheng Dayue’s (1541–1616?) sale catalogue of ink-cake designs, The Ink Garden of Master Cheng (Chengshi moyuan, 1605 and 1610), demonstrates that interest in Western images lay in the innovation and exoticism of such works.52 Early seventeenth-century China was a “culture of curiosities,” in which European pictures were only one of many exotic options available to entrepreneurs seeking commercially successful images that would appeal to the general interest in novelty, which often privileged the foreign.53 There is some evidence that German and Flemish prints, particularly maps and cityscapes, may have been the most influential in providing new ideas for paintings. Pictorial devices from
these prints (such as cross-hatching, dramatic shading contrasts for mass and volume, and particular landscape motifs) have been linked to the increased naturalism, changes in the surface texture and tonal contrasts, and semiperspectival renderings of topography found in some seventeenth-century literati ink landscape painting—perhaps even in the emphasis on representing convexity and concavity in the works of Dong Qichang.54
However, as exemplified by the two sample illustrations, the Chinese Jesuit-printed books included almost no shading or highlights to add volume to their subjects, the feature that Ricci (although not a painter himself) felt was the major difference between Chinese and European painting.55 In figure painting, the resulting sculptural, animated quality of the people in European paintings amazed Ricci’s acquaintance Gu Qiyuan (1565–1628), who, after viewing a painting of the Madonna and Child, remarked that “the face seems alive: the body, arms and hands seem to protrude from the panel, and the concave and convex parts of the face appear no different from those of a living person.”56 Gu uses the same terms for concavity and convexity (aotu) that were used to describe the foreign-derived volumetric figural style used at Dunhuang more than a millennium earlier. Although this specific style had long been forgotten, the reapplication of this terminology in another foreign painting context may suggest a continued perception that such three-dimensional painting was inherently foreign.
However, by and large, seventeenth-century literati responded negatively to the aesthetics of European pictorial techniques intended to replicate figures, objects, and spaces as they appeared in reality.57 In a display of cultural politics constructed in response to perceived challenges to literati painting values—and therefore, by extension, to China itself—European paintings and prints became an “Other” against which Chinese painting could be measured and found superior.58 While the absence in Chinese painting of the illusionistic techniques valued in Europe prompted Ricci to criticize Chinese painters and paintings as inferior to European,59 the presence of those same techniques in European painting prompted Chinese artists working in the orthodox style to express their contempt for such things using the same literati discourse established in the Northern Song and reinvigorated by Dong Qichang.
The clearest example of this rejection is from the devout Christian and ordained Jesuit priest Wu Li (1632–1718). Famous for his landscape paintings and one of the Six Masters of the Early Qing (Qing Liu Jia), alongside Wang Hui, Wu had significant exposure to his religion’s foreign style and strong ideological reasons to support it. He spent five months, from late 1681 to early 1682, at Macau’s bustling Jesuit seminary attached to the magnificent Cathedral of St. Paul, where he would have had many opportunities to see European paintings. Even in the paintings produced as part of his work there, he carefully maintained the orthodox style in which he had been educated as a young man, inscribing one such painting with a colophon stating that he took the ancient painting masters as his stylistic models for the work.60 In particular, he disagreed with the European representational focus on realism: “Our painting values originality, not resemblance. We call this ‘inspired and
free.’ Their painting is all about shading, volume, and resemblance, and is achieved by laboriously following convention. It’s the same with signatures. We sign at the top [that is, conspicuously] while they sign at the bottom. The use of the brush is also different in all respects.”61 Wu may have frequently expressed his strong faith in Christian devotional poetry, but for his painting, the style and subject matter associated with his classical Confucian education proved stronger than the imported styles and subjects associated with his faith. To Chinese critics, any visible evidence of European inspiration or Christian subject matter in Wu’s works would have suggested a technical rather than expressive achievement, making it unlikely that later writers would have considered him one of the Six Masters of the Qing dynasty.
Despite the pervasive literati rejection of Western realism, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a revival of ruled-line architectural painting (jiehua, literally “boundary painting,” figure 1.6), a style and pictorial sense that epitomized Northern Song realism. These paintings required straightedges to create meticulously detailed images of buildings with fine straight lines that recede diagonally into the distance, resulting in paintings that can resemble Western perspectival paintings.62 Ruled-line architectural paintings do not rely on geometry, however, and retain the uptilted ground plane of isometric perspective. The orthogonal-like lines recede in sharply diagonal parallels that rarely converge; if they do, the point of convergence often occurs too far outside the picture plane to be significant to the painting itself. Despite these differences, jiehua was visually close enough to perspective that some even referred to European paintings as “Western-style jiehua,”63 thereby domesticating foreign works with Chinese terminology. The jiehua revival points to another disjunction between the literati ideal and popular interest; yet literati criticism of realism (whether Northern Song or Western) meant that period perceptions of both types of painting suffered from their shared reliance on tools and techniques. These were both seen as making the artist “ ‘other-dependent,’ on both technical tools and merely external truth, rather than inwardly on the cultural self,” which is precisely what the literati valued.64
Given that Matteo Ricci’s conversion campaign was originally aimed at the literati, his use of European works of art as some of the tools for conversion was destined to meet aesthetic resistance. Despite his progressive accommodation and acculturation policies, he did not understand that even if the Ming elite whom he courted enjoyed the novelty of the works and their volumetric appearance, they still considered them neither aesthetically valuable nor appropriate for true art. The scholar Jiang Shaoshu (fl. 1642–79) described the faces and robes of Ricci’s painting of the Madonna of St. Luke as lifelike and animated, but then subtly condemned the work when he noted that the “the dignity and elegance [of the figures] are such that a Chinese artisan painter [huagong] could not manage it.”65 Jiang may have assessed the skills of the artist who produced the Madonna as