making a coded statement about accepting Kangxi and the Qing, given the newness of Manchu rule.
Although Jiao produced the prints in 1696, the power of linear perspective and its accompanying illusionistic depth cues to deceive the viewer had been established at the Kangxi court around 1667, when the Italian Jesuit astronomer-mathematician Ludovico Buglio (Li Leisi, 1606–82) displayed three large perspectival paintings depicting a Chinese palace, a European palace, and a garden as part of a much larger Jesuit demonstration of optics for Kangxi. Verbiest’s account of this episode is the first Jesuit record of the Chinese
response specifically to perspectival images. Noting that Buglio made the paintings as large as possible, thereby increasing the illusionistic effects of their perspective, Verbiest commented,
Really, there comes no end to their admiration [when they see] how such deep backgrounds with roads, porches, courtyards, columns, and all other things can be conjured up on the absolutely flat surface of a canvas, and so close to reality that many of them—who have never seen or heard of such things before—were totally deluded when suddenly confronted at a fairly great distance with such paintings of houses and gardens and thought they were seeing real houses and gardens! . . . You can hardly believe how this art attracted everybody’s attention.77
Jean-Baptiste du Halde, S.J. (1674–1743), although not present at the event, also commented secondhand on how these works impressed the officials who saw them: “The Mandarins, who flock to this city from all parts, came to see them out of curiosity, and were all equally struck with the sight: they could not conceive how it was possible on a plain cloth to represent halls, galleries, porticoes, roads and alleys that seemed to reach as far as the eye could see, and all this so naturally that at the first sight they were deceived by it.”78 The paintings are not known to have survived, and there is no question that these comments are rife with the self-promoting rhetoric of the Jesuit mission. Nevertheless, they provide the first focused indication that High Qing viewers found perspectival paintings and their illusions of depth entirely legible.
Linear perspective so impressed Kangxi that he requested the Jesuits to send a trained European painter to Beijing to paint for him and to teach the technique to the court artists. Several European painters arrived in succession, but none left an impression on either the court or Chinese art until the 1699 arrival of the Modenese Jesuit lay brother Giovanni Gherardini (1655–1723?).79 With Gherardini, the court welcomed not just any perspective painter, but a student of Michelangelo Colonna (1604–87) and Agostino Mitelli (1609–60), Bolognese masters in the art of quadratura. Early Renaissance quadraturisti such as Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431–1506) first painted these deceptive works on the walls and ceilings of private residences, but during the sixteenth century quadratura spread to public spaces such as theaters, for which Andrea Palladio (1508–80) designed perspectival stage sets, and churches, for which Andrea Pozzo, S.J. (1642–1709), has been acclaimed as the “greatest of the ecclesiastical perspectivists.”80 Famous across Europe, Pozzo and his art were essential components of Jesuit propaganda and the global mission.81 The Apotheosis of St. Ignatius and the Society of Jesus (1688–94), Pozzo’s masterwork painted on the ceiling of the Jesuit mother church of Sant’Ignazio in Rome (figure. 1.8), is the paragon of quadratura painting because of its logical, consistent linkage of real and fictive architecture to create an extraordinary but believable vision that merges the physical and the spiritual.82
1.8Andrea Pozzo, S.J., The Apotheosis of St. Ignatius and the Society of Jesus, 1694. Sant’Ignazio, Rome.
Bruce McAdam/Creative Commons.
The painting begins just above the cornice level of the church beneath the windows and extends onto the flat ceiling beginning directly above them, taking advantage of the sunlight streaming in through the glass to illuminate the divine space pictured on the ceiling. The illusion that the flat ceiling is a lofty vault open to the heavens is only legible from one position in the church, marked with a golden disc set in the floor of the nave. From this position, the painting unifies the church architecture with the heavens and creates a miraculous vision for the viewer through the theatrical, illusionistic expansion of the church’s limited vertical space into a divinely radiant and infinite celestial realm populated with angels and cherubs. Elaborate gilding, sculpted figural decoration, and numerous columns enhance the fictive white stone architecture, which continues from the real architecture below. Illustrating the Jesuits’ global mission to spread the Catholic faith as the universal church, allegories of the four continents of Asia, Africa, America, and Europe painted between the real church windows are not lifeless white stone sculptures, but spring vividly to life in full color and dynamic movement. Perpetually ascending skyward, the center of the fictive ceiling is entirely open, enabling male and female angels to convey a few particular Jesuits heavenward on rosy clouds. Seemingly the mortal highest up in the firmament, the radiant figure of St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, is personally welcomed into heaven by Christ, who bears the cross of his Crucifixion lightly over his left shoulder while reaching 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
