landscape master Ni Zan (1302–74). This would have been an ideal and highly valued painting for a literatus to own, especially given the importance of Ni Zan in orthodox landscape painting and as a model literatus. Rather than closing off the image, however, the representation of the screen painting, with its characteristic Ni Zan composition split between foreground and background over a visible distance, serves to deepen the sense of interior space in the overall scene. The background mountains are depicted on a smaller scale than the rocks and dead tree in the foreground, which, along with the blank paper visible
between them, suggests a vast distance. Although the architecture, figures, and landscapes in Rules for Reciting the Rosary are not generally sinicized, the pictorial conventions in the illustrations are consistently Chinese: neither shading nor cast shadows suggest mass or volume; figures do not diminish in size with distance from the viewer; and space does not recede horizontally, as with linear perspective, but rather vertically up the picture plane in isometric perspective. Relying on a Chinese model for spatial recession, therefore, the Ni Zan–style landscape in this first image is an elegant pictorial compromise to suggest deep space with an image that would have been immediately familiar to the literati the Jesuits sought to convert. The entire scene therefore demonstrates that Christianity was entirely commensurate with literati lifestyle and culture.
Using a different approach, Aleni’s Illustrated Explanation typically incorporates shading, size changes, and horizontal recession, together with a variation on the “image-above-text- below” (shangtu xiawen) format and the presentation of multiple narrative moments in a single image that were common in late imperial Chinese woodblock-printed fiction.50 How the Illustrated Explanation integrates these period printing conventions together with single-point perspective is seen in “Washing the Feet of the Disciples at the Last Supper” (figure 1.5). The haloed Christ appears three times in this continuous narrative, which proceeds from left to right in the European mode of reading, rather than from right to left, as was common in Chinese books and horizontal scroll paintings. The key elements of these three moments are ordered using Chinese characters, and differentiated by setting each moment in a different architectural space on a different scale. The smallest section of the image, at the top left, shows the meal itself with the disciples seated around the radiant Christ; Christ then leads his disciples into the room at the bottom left in the extreme foreground; and in the largest section of the image he remonstrates with Peter over his reluctance to allow Christ to wash his feet. The figures diminish dramatically in size with their distance from the viewer, and although shading in this image is subtly limited to architecture and furniture, other illustrations in the book show even more modeling through shading (although not on any of the figures themselves) as well as cast shadows.
The tiled floor on which Christ kneels offers the viewer visual entry into the image at the eponymous moment in the narrative. The orthogonals of the tiles recede horizontally away from the viewer to terminate behind the seated disciples at an incongruous folding screen with a landscape painting in isometric perspective, surrounded by more traditional ink plum and bamboo. The landscape on the screen initially seems to extend the space of the room, as a window onto a background landscape might, and repeats the Annunciation illustration’s use of an identifiably Chinese landscape painting to create this effect. But with its abrupt application of isometric perspective in the space where a vanishing point should be, the folding landscape screen is a blunt insertion of a Chinese pictorial convention within the otherwise predominantly European representational treatment. One can only speculate why the artist chose to include a Chinese-style landscape and painting format in just this particular space and scene. Perhaps it was because the narrative occurs
1.4Joao da Rocha, S.J.,
“The Annunciation.” Woodblock
print. From Rules for Reciting
the Rosary, 1619. The Getty
Research Institute, Los Angeles
(1374-445).
in a private home, as does the Annunciation, and therefore a screen painting would not have been out of place as meaningful ornament underlining the homeowner’s identity. Or perhaps it was an alternative to the dark, curtained wall shaded with cross-hatching in the original European image, which would have been difficult to replicate legibly in woodblock prints. Other illustrations in the Chinese text demonstrate a relative comfort with deep central spatial recession to a single vanishing point, so perhaps the inclusion of the landscape was thought to enhance the spatial depth perspective offered; or perhaps a different artist, with a less confident grasp of perspective, produced this particular illustration. Whatever the reason, the inclusion of linear perspective in the Aleni series provides the first incontrovertible occurrences of the technique in Chinese art. It would not be seen again until late in the Kangxi reign.
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
