the splattered ink dots into a fly. The result was so realistic that the king himself was fooled and tried to brush the fly off the surface of the screen. More than a thousand years later, in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, the addition of an illusionistic fly or a bee rendered so skillfully that the viewer would try to brush it away from the surface of the painting became a particularly popular device. Even when mentioned in literature, this addition that was otherwise unrelated to the painting evoked illusionistic skill in the tradition of Zeuxis and Parrhasius.2
This scant cluster of third-century responses is all the evidence that remains of Xu Mao, Xun Xu, Cao Buxing, and their works. Yet even these three anecdotes begin to
demonstrate the presence and power of successfully deceptive pictorial illusionism in Chinese painting well in advance of European contact and the later introduction of perspectival illusionism. Long before scenic illusions were affixed to Qing imperial walls, deceptively illusionistic murals occupied an important historical position in Chinese painting. Therefore, tracing the history of this type of painting and responses to it contextualizes scenic illusion paintings within the much larger narrative of Chinese painting rather than isolating them. Specifically, ideas about illusionistic painting were significantly shaped by literati criticism of trained technique and realistic depiction in paintings produced for popular consumption as inferior to the originality and spontaneity of paintings produced for self-expression. Thus, when European paintings began to circulate in China during the late sixteenth century, elite aesthetic responses to them were nuanced by this discourse into something more than simply reactions to foreignness. Amid the literati-driven “cultural politics of the brushstroke” that arose in response to the challenges of European representational modes, however,3 not only were these new imported styles and techniques approved of at the imperial level, but even the most dismissive critics could not deny the deceptive power of the foreign techniques. Tracing this trajectory into the Kangxi reign frames the late imperial introduction of European illusionistic painting within both the long history of Chinese paintings and the shorter High Qing era of Sino-European artistic engagement vis-à-vis the missionary artists at court, which together created the diverse pictorial environment in which scenic illusion paintings would develop in the late 1720s.
The Rise and Fall of Murals
Textual sources record the presence of illusionistic murals inside palaces and public spaces from at least the Western Han through Yuan dynasties, but the relatively few extant examples (compared to the innumerable portable paintings) are found almost exclusively in religious and mortuary contexts.4 Within these liminal spaces of supernatural contact and otherworldly access, tomb and temple murals demonstrate how large architectural surfaces could be transformed into permeable membranes connecting the human and suprahuman realms. Over the centuries, a consistent visual language of supernatural motifs in these murals helped transform walls into the borders between the mundane and magical worlds.5 The persistent presence of murals in early and medieval tombs marks the paintings as essential to conceptualizing the overall space and purpose of the tomb: murals complete the relationship between tomb occupant(s), material contents, and spatial layout to create a fully realized mortuary world that was distinct from the human realm.6 Tomb murals were, however, primarily produced for the dead. With the renewed interest in Daoism and the rise of Buddhism among the tumultuous fragmentation of post-Han medieval China, the emphasis on the supernatural and otherworldly in murals expanded aboveground to temples and cave grottoes, which were firmly situated within the realm of the living.7
As the primary mode of decoration in medieval Buddhist temples and cave grottoes, murals visualized the narratives and events described in sutras as ways to achieve enlightenment, and presented detailed visions of accessible afterlife paradises populated by seemingly three-dimensional deities. Buddhism, with its practices of conflating reality and illusion, reconciling the existence of multiple worlds, and a fundamental doctrine of trying to escape reincarnation, inherently relies on “vision, optics, phantasmagoria, and meditation, and readily dissolves the cognitive boundaries between the observer and the observed.”8 Extant medieval Buddhist murals, most notably those on the plastered rock walls of the temple grottoes at Dunhuang’s Mogao Caves preserve the traces of three-dimensional illusionism in early Chinese murals. Located at an eastern oasis of the Taklamakan desert, Dunhuang was a major pilgrimage site and stopping point for trade caravans, and from the fourth through fourteenth centuries it benefited from the blend of Chinese, Indian, Tibetan, and Central Asian painting styles brought by the many artists who arrived there alongside travelers and pilgrims. To lend convincingly three- dimensional skin, muscle, and animation to Buddhist deities, artists utilized the Indian “flush-tinted” (yunran) or “convex and concave method” (aotufa) painting techniques of layering flesh-toned lines and colors.9 By using rosy-toned pigments instead of black ink to outline the figures, and adding highlights to their limbs and faces, these murals suggested three-dimensional beings rather than flat figures depicted on a flat surface. The fleshy, rounded appearance of these figures is commonly thought to have originated with Buddhism outside of China, both the religion and the representational technique still retaining something of their foreign import during this early period.
Building on the deceptively sculptural effects of these painting techniques, the Dunhuang artists often presented the Buddha and his entourage in architectural environments that suggested deep horizontal recession, and therefore real three-dimensional spaces contiguous with the viewer’s own space. On the south wall of an eighth-century cave, for example, a representation of a three-dimensional recessed niche populated by the Buddha and his attendants was placed in the center of a two-dimensional landscape (figure 1.1). Appearing to have burst through a more flatly rendered painting of figures in landscape, the niche portion of the painting creates the illusion that the viewer is having a direct encounter with the Buddha.10 This impression is amplified by a viewer’s general desire for their animation that is inherent in all illusionistic paintings of figures regardless of where they are produced,11 as well as by the specific Chinese belief that salvation by a Buddhist deity was entirely possible in the real world. In Buddhist murals like this one, such lifelike deities might therefore appear poised to offer the viewer salvation from the burden of reincarnation, whereas visibly painted figures, as in the background landscape, could not. The sudden juxtaposition of two- and three-dimensional treatments in this mural strengthens the illusionism of the central niche scene, the space of which seems to recede horizontally backwards away from the viewer while the surrounding landscape recedes vertically up the plane of the wall in the more linear Chinese mode. Such abrupt contrasts
between seemingly real spaces and flat paintings, created by breaking up one painting style with another, are found in a number of Dunhuang’s Tang caves, demonstrating that these visual formats convincingly presented a divine space contiguous with the viewer’s own to firmly place the viewer in the presence of the Buddha and thereby offer unmediated experience of the divine. The supernatural beings depicted in the imported convex-and-concave representational style and the illusionistic spaces they occupied facilitated the viewer’s visual entry across the boundary of the wall into this other world, which was now part of the viewer’s own world because it seemingly existed parallel to the viewer’s line of sight (rather than perpendicular to it as the two-dimensional landscapes did). The size of the surfaces on which these images were painted further supported the potential for visual illusion: walls and ceilings, surfaces significantly larger than the viewer, completely engulfed his or her visual field. When deployed together with pictorial techniques that created the effects of mass and volume, the combined wall- and ceiling-painting programs in the Mogao caves often depicted complete alternate worlds in which the viewer could fully immerse him- or herself.
By the
