Zhao Mengfu’s (1254–1322) Methods of Using Color, leaf G from Wang Hui and Wang Shiming, Landscapes after Ancient Masters, 1674 and 1677. Album leaf, ink and color on paper, 22 × 33.8 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, The Dillon Fund Gift, 1989 (1989.141.4a-rr).
With these ideas as the new orthodoxy, little more than the names of a few muralists survive from the seventeenth century. Although at this time in Hangzhou one could still see murals believed to date as far back as the Tang dynasty,40 the dominant mode of seventeenth-century painting continued Dong’s ideas as further transformed by Wang Hui (1632–1717). Under the tutelage of Dong’s leading student, Wang Shimin (1592–1680), Wang Hui became the leading orthodox landscapist of his own generation by disagreeing with the exclusive privileging of Dong’s codified lineage, but never abandoning that heritage. Consequently, he created his own inclusive Great Synthesis of the brushwork and forms characteristic of many famous historical masters to blend mimesis and calligraphy, Yuan literati abstraction and Song professional realism, and what he called the “obscure” (an) and the “obvious” (ming) into nothing short of a landscape painting revolution.41 Wang’s work in this area is exemplified by a small album leaf painting, Peach Blossom Spring Following Zhao Mengfu’s (1254–1322) Methods of Using Color (figure 1.3), in which he employs the distinctive ropy but parallel “hemp-fiber” texture strokes (pimacun) characteristic of Dong Yuan (act. 930s–60s) and reinterpreted by both Zhao Mengfu and Huang Gongwang (1269–1354) to indicate the crevices of the rounded rocks, along with the archaic Tang blue-and-green landscape painting mode that Zhao Mengfu had also reinterpreted.42 Calligraphic strokes mix with vibrant colors in a dramatic juxtaposition of historical styles that would likely have shocked Dong Qichang, as the rich green of the hills contrasts with the lively pink of the blossoming peach trees to create a vivid image of the paradigmatic fantasy realm that still owes more to historical painting references then to the actual appearance of a spring landscape.43 Blue-and-green landscapes had long been associated with “visions of paradise or an antique golden age”; the application of a historical style to this particular subject of a magical world set apart from the real world therefore further separated the depicted landscape from nature and reality.44 By synthesizing certain nonliterati elements into the literati mode in his own way, Wang Hui integrated the pictorial past with his own originality in the present, but still relied on abstracted historical styles rather than accurate depiction based on nature.
Such was the environment into which European pictures were introduced. The specific historical moments of the Tang, Northern Song, and seventeenth century exemplify just how inextricable the decline of pictorial illusionism and trained technique vis-à-vis murals are from the rise in literati painting aesthetics and values. Peaking around 1600, just as European images and representational techniques began arriving in China, such priorities could not but affect responses to European works that emphasized technique, mimesis, and illusionism—the very elements the literati explicitly rejected beginning centuries earlier. Through the Jesuits, the works they brought from Europe, and those they created in China to serve their mission, the tensions over formlikeness versus spirit resonance in art now became inflected by cultural differences as much as by social and intellectual differences.
Cultural Politics and the Early Sino-European Artistic Encounter
Although the first Europeans confirmed to have spent extended time on Chinese soil were missionaries and travelers at the Mongol Yuan court,45 and the Portuguese settled on Macau as a trading port under Ming sovereignty in the 1550s, sustained mainland Chinese contact with Europeans began only with the establishment of the Jesuit mission there in the late sixteenth century. Several different Catholic groups established missions in China, but the Jesuits were by far the most influential, and were largely responsible for the transmission of Renaissance European culture.46 Founded by St. Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556) in Rome in 1540, the Society of Jesus provided its members with unparalleled levels of polymathic education in theology, rhetoric, languages, logic, philosophy, mathematics, and science as tools for global conversion. Although they did not specifically train their novitiates in painting, leaving that to individual interests, the Society was well aware of the persuasive power of the image, and often commissioned works of art such as engravings, printed books, and oil paintings with didactic Christian subjects. The high demand of the foreign missions for images led to local Jesuit art schools, such as in Japan. In 1583, Alessandro Valignano, S.J. (1539–1606), founded a Japanese “Seminary of Painting,” which was headed by the Neapolitan painter, engraver, and sculptor Giovanni Niccolò, S.J. (1563–1626).47 Working in a varyingly syncretic blend of European and Japanese styles, the so-called Niccolò school produced religious paintings and prints as well as trained artists, all of which served the Asian missions in Japan and elsewhere even after the Japanese government expelled all missionaries from the archipelago to Macau in 1614.
In 1582, only one year before the painting seminary opened in Japan, Matteo Ricci, S.J. (Li Madou, 1552–1610), established the Jesuit mission in China. For the remainder of the Ming dynasty, this mission sought to reconcile Christianity and European technical knowledge with scholarly Confucianism in order to appeal to the scholar-official class, whose dress Ricci adopted as the standard Jesuit costume in China. Ricci regularly used religious prints and paintings as evangelical tools, and requested that his superiors
in Rome send large masterpieces as well as a European painter capable of producing such works. Although the painter never arrived, leaving Ricci to rely on Niccolò-trained artists, some paintings and numerous prints were sent, becoming the first examples of post-Renaissance European art to circulate in China as well as the foundation for the illustrations in Jesuit-sponsored printed books.48
The Jesuit Jerome Nadal’s (1507–80) famous Evangelicae historiae imagines ex ordine Evangeliorum quae toto anno in Missae Sacrificio recitantur (printed in Antwerp between 1593 and 1595) became the source for the two best-known illustrated books that the Jesuits printed in seventeenth-century China, which are the first clear examples of the blending of Chinese and European representational methods that would later characterize Qing court painting. Rules for Reciting the Rosary (Song nianzhu guicheng, c. 1619–23) is credited to Gaspar Ferreira, S.J. (Fei Qigui, 1571–1649), and João da Rocha, S.J. (Luo Ruwang, 1583–1623), and Illustrated Explanation of the Incarnation of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu jiangsheng chuxiang jingjie, 1637) to Giulio Aleni, S.J. (Ai Rulüe, 1592–1649).49 It is important to note that only Nadal’s images were transferred, and not the technology of copperplate engraving with which his book was printed. Both of these Chinese books are woodblock printed, taking advantage of the highly developed printing industry that played such an important role in late Ming visual culture, but it is unclear whether Ferreira, da Rocha, and Aleni were themselves responsible for the illustrations in the books, as the identities of the artists, block carvers, and printers are unknown. However, the diverse ways in which these illustrations combine Chinese and European pictorial devices provide concrete examples of how the artists, whomever they might have been, were integrating new and established conventions.
Depicting the Annunciation (figure. 1.4), the first illustration in Rules for Reciting the Rosary is one of only two illustrations in the book set in an identifiably Chinese environment appropriate for a literati scholar-official. Although the Virgin and the angel wear Western-style robes consistent with the foreign costumes found throughout the book, the scene occurs in an unmistakably Ming private home, in a room elegantly furnished with a daybed and a tall four-legged table that the Virgin uses as a prie-dieu. The room opens onto a garden, only just visible at the left side of the image, in which banana plants identify the scene as set in southeastern China, the literati heartland. Behind the Virgin is not, as might appear at first glance, a view onto the surrounding landscape, but rather a large standing screen with
