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 above those of an artisan painter, but simply by using this term he immediately categorized the Madonna as the product of a professionally trained technician rather than of a true artist (namely,
1.6Detail of Yuan Jiang,
The Penglai Isle of the Immortals,
1708. Hanging scroll, ink
and color on silk, 160 × 97 cm.
Palace Museum, Beijing,
Gu187505.
a literatus). Perhaps the religious subject matter of this painting also diminished Jiang’s assessment of its quality: a religious work would have been produced by professional painter as a functional devotional image for public consumption, much as a Buddhist or Daoist mural would have been.
Between the use of established literati painting discourse to criticize Western painting and the dominant position that orthodox landscape painting held in the seventeenth century, European representational modes might well have failed to produce any effect whatsoever on Chinese painting. However, with the Kangxi emperor’s appropriation of orthodox, Northern Song, and Western painting elements, all in the service of statecraft, an entirely new synthesis of previously disparate pictorial elements was born. Kangxi established not only the precedent for imperial commissions that blended Chinese and European styles, but also the presence of trained European artists at the High Qing court—and with them, the use of deceptive illusionistic painting to advance the Qing imperial agenda.
Appropriating Western Painting at the Kangxi Court
Johann Adam Schall von Bell, S.J. (Tang Ruowang, 1591–1666), was just beginning to use a combination of Western art and science to make inroads at the Ming court when that dynasty fell in 1644 due to an internal rebellion. The rebellion was subsequently quelled with assistance from the Manchu Qing dynasty, which had established itself well north of the Great Wall in 1636, but the Qing then succeeded the Ming to become the new foreign rulers of China. Beginning his work anew with the Shunzhi emperor (r. 1644–61), Schall von Bell became first a scientific advisor and later a personal mentor to the young ruler, thereby succeeding in establishing the Jesuits as both scientific advisors and imperial teachers of Western learning (Xixue). Shunzhi’s heir Kangxi demonstrated deep interest in the various branches of European knowledge that made up the Renaissance scholastic quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Ferdinand Verbiest, S.J. (Nan Huairen, 1623–88), who assisted and later succeeded Schall von Bell as the director of Beijing’s astronomical observatory in 1669, noted that linear perspective played a key role in the mathematical sciences taught at the Qing court.66 Although a painting technique, linear perspective was introduced as part of geometry and therefore was
