Imperial Illusions - Kristina Kleutghen Art History Publication Initiative Books

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toward St. Ignatius with his right hand. Christ is positioned at the vanishing point of the painting, which is rendered distant through the hazy pastel colors of atmospheric perspective, suggesting a swirling vortex of clouds, rather than the much brighter tones used for the sky and the figures within the architectural confines. The painting resolves at the end of the ceiling farthest away from the viewer in a dark coffered dome with a windowed oculus, which became Pozzo’s trademark feature and was repeated in several Jesuit churches across Europe. Pozzo illustrated the method he used to create this complicated quadratura and transfer the draft to the ceiling in his popular printed treatise Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum (1693, 1698). This treatise not only spread knowledge of the painting and was an important demonstration of Jesuit devotion, but also was held in the Jesuit library in Beijing and later played an important role in at least one court official’s understanding of illusionistic painting.83

      By the late seventeenth century, quadratura had also spread to France, where Gherardini (not a Jesuit) was painting for Philip Julian Mancini, the Duke de Nevers (1641–1707). In the late 1690s Joachim Bouvet, S.J. (1656–1730), one of the five French Jesuit mathematicians whom Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) sent as the “King’s Mathematicians” to the Kangxi court in 1685 and one of only two who served Kangxi directly, convinced Gherardini to join the royal-sponsored French Jesuit mission to Beijing.84 Giovanni Gherardini’s specialized training in quadratura thus brought this most illusionistically deceptive form of perspectival painting forms to Beijing. Gherardini spent the next five years painting for the Kangxi court and training court artists, as well as painting quadratura inside the French Jesuit North Church (Beitang); otherwise almost nothing is known about his

      1.9Anonymous court painters,

      Portrait of Kangxi Reading,

      c. 1700–1705. Hanging scroll, ink

      and colors on silk, 137 × 106 cm.

      Palace Museum, Beijing,

      Gu6411.

      time in China—including his Chinese name. He left the Qing court in 1704 as a favored retainer and subsequently became a member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris.85 Gherardini may only have been in Beijing for a short time, but without the success of his Qing court service and the paintings he produced while in China, perspectival illusionism might not have had the effect it did on Qing court painting.

      One of the few works attributable to Gherardini or his studio is the life-size Portrait of Kangxi Reading (figure 1.9), which depicts the emperor in informal summer robes of rich blue damask with subtle dragon medallions in the same tone and golden metal buttons down the center, in line with the large, lustrous pearl on his red-fringed light summer hat. Kangxi sits cross-legged, likely on a daybed or a kang platform, with a codex-bound book open in front of him, and surrounded by many more books stacked in their colored damask cases on tall two-toned bookshelves that recede perspectivally into the dark and otherwise empty background. Kangxi looks directly out of the painting at the viewer with an inscrutable expression. Unusually, the imperial visage appears visibly shaded and highlighted consistent with a light source originating from the left side of the work (the emperor’s right). Such visible facial shading is all but absent in traditional Chinese portraiture: even Qianlong famously read it as soiled marks on the painting surface, and a portrait of an emperor with a dirty face was utterly unthinkable. Sir John Barrow (1764–1848),

      private secretary to Lord George Macartney (1737–1806) and part of the failed British embassy to the Qianlong court in 1792–94, also noted this characteristic Chinese response to shading on faces. One Qing court minister, upon seeing a portrait of King George III (r. 1760–1820), commented that “ ‘it was a great pity it should have been spoiled by the dirt upon the face,’ pointing, at the same time, to the broad shade of the nose.”86 Even at the end of the eighteenth century, after more than two centuries of European artistic presence in China, this perception of shaded faces as dirty had not changed. Why Kangxi allowed such visible facial modeling through shading remains a mystery, but given the survival of this first imperial portrait executed with European pictorial techniques, he must have approved of it and painting’s sense of authoritative gravitas.87

      The resulting seemingly realistic facial features of this life-size portrait might suggest that it was painted from life and therefore is a true representation of the emperor. However, the Jesuit Louis-Daniel le Comte’s (1655–1728) description of Kangxi suggests that the painter took some artistic license:

      He was something above the middle stature, more corpulent than what in Europe was reckon’d handsome; yet somewhat more slender than a Chinese wished to be; full visaged, disfigured with the small pox, had a broad forehead, little eyes, and a small nose after the Chinese fashions; his mouth was well made, and the lower part of his face very agreeable. In fine, tho’ he bears no great majesty in his looks yet they show abundance of good nature; his ways and actions have something of the prince in them, and show him to be such.88

      Notably missing from this portrait—indeed, from all of Kangxi’s portraits—are the disfiguring smallpox scars, visual evidence that he had survived this disease to which the Manchus were particularly susceptible, and therefore a clear demonstration of the divine approval he enjoyed. Although this detail was omitted, the highly constructed composition of the portrait confirms the artificiality of the image and the careful representation of imperial ideology. The portrait has reduced the emperor and his environment to their fundamental geometric shapes of triangles, circles, and squares. The emperor’s conical hat marks the apex of his triangular seated position, its base broadened by the spread of his robes around his crossed legs; the books and shelves are rigidly rectilinear and perfectly ordered; and the line created by the spherical hat pearl and metal buttons bisects the painting precisely in half. Only subtle differences in the heights of the stacks of books and the positions of the emperor’s hands disturb the otherwise perfect symmetry of the work. This highly geometric and symmetrical composition therefore draws attention to the central vanishing point of the painting.

      Despite the importance of the face in Chinese portraiture, and particularly in imperial portraiture, the vanishing point of this painting lies not on the emperor’s improbably smooth-skinned face but on the open book in front of him, toward which Kangxi seems to reach with his left hand as if about to turn the page. The architectural manifestations

      of knowledge in the full bookshelves framing the emperor, and the placement of the vanishing point on a book, emphasize Kangxi’s commitment to learning and knowledge, perhaps even implying his specific commitment to Western learning given his support of the Jesuits and Gherardini’s service to the Jesuit mission. Kangxi was a committed scholar, receiving daily lectures and tutoring from Chinese scholars on the Confucian classics, and from the Jesuits on various aspects of Western learning. By depicting a book at the vanishing point of this painting, the artist serves the imperial ideology of knowledge and study as a means of state control and a demonstration of Confucian sageliness. Rather than perspective being incorporated “as a means to visualize symbolic command and mastery of Western art,”89 therefore, its use in this imperial portrait supports a seemingly truthful presentation of his commitment to and command over knowledge, as befits an ideal emperor.

      The introduction of perspective within this context of technical knowledge that served imperial power, along with works such as Pictures of Tilling and Weaving and the Portrait of Kangxi Reading, demonstrate how this pictorial technique served Kangxi’s particular political goals. Needing more of these works after Gherardini left China, Kangxi requested that another European painter specifically trained in portraiture and perspective be sent. Gherardini’s immediate successor, Matteo Ripa, S.J. (Ma Guoxian, 1682–1746), repeatedly stated that his painting

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