had the effect it did on Qing court painting.
One of the few works attributable to Gherardini or his studio is the life-size Portrait of Kangxi Reading (figure 1.9), which depicts the emperor in informal summer robes of rich blue damask with subtle dragon medallions in the same tone and golden metal buttons down the center, in line with the large, lustrous pearl on his red-fringed light summer hat. Kangxi sits cross-legged, likely on a daybed or a kang platform, with a codex-bound book open in front of him, and surrounded by many more books stacked in their colored damask cases on tall two-toned bookshelves that recede perspectivally into the dark and otherwise empty background. Kangxi looks directly out of the painting at the viewer with an inscrutable expression. Unusually, the imperial visage appears visibly shaded and highlighted consistent with a light source originating from the left side of the work (the emperor’s right). Such visible facial shading is all but absent in traditional Chinese portraiture: even Qianlong famously read it as soiled marks on the painting surface, and a portrait of an emperor with a dirty face was utterly unthinkable. Sir John Barrow (1764–1848),
private secretary to Lord George Macartney (1737–1806) and part of the failed British embassy to the Qianlong court in 1792–94, also noted this characteristic Chinese response to shading on faces. One Qing court minister, upon seeing a portrait of King George III (r. 1760–1820), commented that “ ‘it was a great pity it should have been spoiled by the dirt upon the face,’ pointing, at the same time, to the broad shade of the nose.”86 Even at the end of the eighteenth century, after more than two centuries of European artistic presence in China, this perception of shaded faces as dirty had not changed. Why Kangxi allowed such visible facial modeling through shading remains a mystery, but given the survival of this first imperial portrait executed with European pictorial techniques, he must have approved of it and painting’s sense of authoritative gravitas.87
The resulting seemingly realistic facial features of this life-size portrait might suggest that it was painted from life and therefore is a true representation of the emperor. However, the Jesuit Louis-Daniel le Comte’s (1655–1728) description of Kangxi suggests that the painter took some artistic license:
He was something above the middle stature, more corpulent than what in Europe was reckon’d handsome; yet somewhat more slender than a Chinese wished to be; full visaged, disfigured with the small pox, had a broad forehead, little eyes, and a small nose after the Chinese fashions; his mouth was well made, and the lower part of his face very agreeable. In fine, tho’ he bears no great majesty in his looks yet they show abundance of good nature; his ways and actions have something of the prince in them, and show him to be such.88
Notably missing from this portrait—indeed, from all of Kangxi’s portraits—are the disfiguring smallpox scars, visual evidence that he had survived this disease to which the Manchus were particularly susceptible, and therefore a clear demonstration of the divine approval he enjoyed. Although this detail was omitted, the highly constructed composition of the portrait confirms the artificiality of the image and the careful representation of imperial ideology. The portrait has reduced the emperor and his environment to their fundamental geometric shapes of triangles, circles, and squares. The emperor’s conical hat marks the apex of his triangular seated position, its base broadened by the spread of his robes around his crossed legs; the books and shelves are rigidly rectilinear and perfectly ordered; and the line created by the spherical hat pearl and metal buttons bisects the painting precisely in half. Only subtle differences in the heights of the stacks of books and the positions of the emperor’s hands disturb the otherwise perfect symmetry of the work. This highly geometric and symmetrical composition therefore draws attention to the central vanishing point of the painting.
Despite the importance of the face in Chinese portraiture, and particularly in imperial portraiture, the vanishing point of this painting lies not on the emperor’s improbably smooth-skinned face but on the open book in front of him, toward which Kangxi seems to reach with his left hand as if about to turn the page. The architectural manifestations
of knowledge in the full bookshelves framing the emperor, and the placement of the vanishing point on a book, emphasize Kangxi’s commitment to learning and knowledge, perhaps even implying his specific commitment to Western learning given his support of the Jesuits and Gherardini’s service to the Jesuit mission. Kangxi was a committed scholar, receiving daily lectures and tutoring from Chinese scholars on the Confucian classics, and from the Jesuits on various aspects of Western learning. By depicting a book at the vanishing point of this painting, the artist serves the imperial ideology of knowledge and study as a means of state control and a demonstration of Confucian sageliness. Rather than perspective being incorporated “as a means to visualize symbolic command and mastery of Western art,”89 therefore, its use in this imperial portrait supports a seemingly truthful presentation of his commitment to and command over knowledge, as befits an ideal emperor.
The introduction of perspective within this context of technical knowledge that served imperial power, along with works such as Pictures of Tilling and Weaving and the Portrait of Kangxi Reading, demonstrate how this pictorial technique served Kangxi’s particular political goals. Needing more of these works after Gherardini left China, Kangxi requested that another European painter specifically trained in portraiture and perspective be sent. Gherardini’s immediate successor, Matteo Ripa, S.J. (Ma Guoxian, 1682–1746), repeatedly stated that his painting skills were insufficient for Kangxi’s requirements.90 When Giuseppe Castiglione arrived in Beijing more than ten years after Gherardini’s departure, little could Kangxi have realized just how profoundly illusionistic Western painting would come to affect Qing court art.
European Artists and Pictorial Illusionism at the High Qing Court
In January 1707, the Society of Jesus registered the nineteen-year-old Milanese painter Giuseppe Castiglione as a “novice coadjutor assigned to the Chinese Province.”91 Castiglione shared several traits with Giovanni Gherardini: both were trained professional painters; neither was ordained as a priest (Castiglione remained a lay brother throughout his Jesuit career, as was common for professionals who joined the order as grown men); both developed their painting from the same Bolognese tradition of illusionistic perspectival painting; and both followed master quadraturisti. Castiglione’s professional artistic training was likely conducted within a workshop, and he claimed to work in the tradition of Jesuit quadraturista Andrea Pozzo, although there is no evidence of direct studentship.92 In 1709, Castiglione was transferred to Coimbra, Portugal, in preparation for his departure to China from Lisbon, but royal painting commissions delayed that departure until April 1714. The Coimbra paintings have disappeared, but Castiglione’s own few letters and other textual records show that he painted portraits for the royal family as well as quadratura depicting perspectival stairs and illusionistic foliage in the chapel of St. Francis Borgia in the Jesuit College.93 Precisely during that period, the Portuguese Jesuit mathematician and
professor Inácio Vieira (1678–1739) produced his own treatises on optics and perspective by studying the image distortions found in quadratura.94 Although the effects of Castiglione’s five years in Portugal on his paintings produced for the Qing emperors remain unexplored, Portugal seems to have proven a particularly fertile environment in which Castiglione honed his skills in perspective and monumental illusionism required for quadratura that would ultimately lead to the development of scenic illusions in China.
Castiglione arrived in Beijing in 1715, taking up his post at the same time as the climax of the Chinese Rites controversy, which had a significant impact
