and accommodation, which originated in Asia with Alessandro Valignano’s work at the short-lived Japanese mission, manifested itself in China through the Jesuits’ adoption of the dress, language, and customs of the educated elite, including the use of scholarly Confucian terms and concepts to explain Christianity. In 1692, although Kangxi himself had not converted, he issued an edict of toleration for Christianity, and promoted an atmosphere of liberalism and intellectual exchange. Other Catholic groups evangelizing in China in the seventeenth century, including the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians, vehemently disagreed with the Jesuit acculturation policy and refused to adopt Chinese cultural customs. This extended even to the very terms used to name the divine: the Jesuits permitted the traditional Chinese terms tian (heaven) and Shangdi (God, literally, “Supreme Emperor”) be used for these Christian concepts, but the other groups did not, preferring the neologism Tianzhu (Lord of heaven) for God. Furthermore, they argued that the essential Chinese practice of ancestor veneration, common to both elite Confucian customs as well as traditional folk beliefs, was incompatible with Christianity in general and the First Commandment in particular. In contrast, the Jesuits argued that ancestor veneration was more a social custom than a sacred rite, and that the veneration of Confucius was a civil matter. They promoted the successes achieved by their acculturation policies as evidence in support of their position, successes that also incited envy among their missionary competition for achieving a Christian China. The result of these divisions was the Chinese Rites controversy, which peaked in 1715 when Pope Clement XI (r. 1700–21) issued the bull Ex illa die, which reinforced a 1704 decree that Chinese ancestor worship and Confucian rituals conflicted with Catholic teaching. Henceforth, Pope Clement declared, these ancient customs were prohibited among Chinese converts.
Declaring this unacceptable and nonsensical, the previously tolerant Kangxi banned Christian evangelism in China in 1721, but allowed the Jesuits to stay on at his court as respected teachers and advisors. Kangxi’s successor, Yongzheng, took a more aggressive stance: he banned Catholicism outright at the beginning of his reign, ordered all Chinese Christians to renounce their foreign faith, and expelled all missionaries to Macau except those directly serving the court in technical capacities. Yongzheng’s division of the missionaries in this way enabled Castiglione to stay on as a court artist, and he later began to paint for Yongzheng’s fifth son, the prince Hungli. When Hungli ascended the throne
as the Qianlong emperor in 1736, the established relationship between ruler and painter deepened into favored patronage for the Italian. Castiglione, a respected master court painter specializing in portraiture, served Qianlong faithfully as a painter, painting teacher, and architect until his death in 1766, when Qianlong buried the Italian in Beijing and posthumously promoted him to vice-minister (shilang). This unprecedentedly high rank for a foreigner demonstrated the ruler’s esteem and personal affection for both the man and his artistic talents that served three High Qing emperors over more than fifty years.
Although Castiglione was unquestionably a significant influence on Qing court painting, and almost certainly the most talented European artist to serve these emperors, he has rather overshadowed the five European colleagues and the many Chinese colleagues with whom he served in Qianlong’s Wish-Fulfilling Studio. Perhaps the best known after Castiglione is the French Jesuit Jean-Denis Attiret (Wang Zhicheng, 1702–68), who arrived in 1737 and whose numerous letters back to French colleagues were published in the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, most importantly his 1742 letter describing the Perfect Brightness Garden.95 The other four artists are much less known. The Bohemian Jesuit Ignatius Sichelbarth (Ai Qimeng, 1708–80) arrived in 1745 and is best known for his paintings of dogs; the Italian Augustine Giovanni Damasceno Salusti (An Deyi, d. 1781) is also best known for paintings of dogs. The Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Panzi (Pan Tingzhang, d. before 1812) and the French Jesuit Louis de Poirot (He Qingtai, 1735–1813) both arrived in 1771, several years after Castiglione’s death.96 Regardless of when they arrived at court, these men worked side by side with their non-European colleagues, such as Yao Wenhan (act. 1743–c. 1773), Jin Tingbiao (act. mid-eighteenth century), Ding Guanpeng (c. 1708–71), Shen Yuan (act. mid-eighteenth century), and Castiglione’s students, including Zhang Weibang (act. c. 1726–61), Wang Youxue (act. c. 1733–80s), Wang Ruxue (act. mid–late eighteenth century), and the Manchu Ilantai (act. c. 1750s–90s).97
Qianlong maintained an active role in his painting academy, particularly the elite branch of the Wish-Fulfilling Studio, and was familiar enough with each man’s particular talents to request specific artists for particular projects. Typically, he would first commission one or more artists to produce a draft of a painting intended for a specific location and later comment personally on that draft, often requesting changes before finally approving it for execution and ultimately approving the finished work.98 Following standard practice, the men of the Wish-Fulfilling Studio frequently collaborated on commissions, each contributing his individual talents in painting faces, robes, architecture, landscape, flowers, and so on to create the “best” overall work (although not necessarily the most stylistically cohesive). Often their extant works are unsigned: rarely do the many collaborative works in the Qing imperial collection display the names of the many hands involved in them, but sometimes attributions can be established from the painting academy archives. These archives also reveal that many works signed only by Castiglione were in fact produced by several artists. Careful consideration, therefore, should be given to any painting attributed solely to him.99
Despite the Jesuits’ consistent and successful missionary activity throughout the eighteenth century, in 1773 Pope Clement XIV (r. 1769–74) issued a bull formally suppressing the Society of Jesus and its members. Giuseppe Panzi and Louis de Poirot, having arrived only two years earlier, stayed on as painters at the Qing court well into the Jiaqing reign. Poirot also served as a translator and continued the work of the Jesuit mission in the first translations of the Old Testament into Manchu and of the New Testament into Chinese. Very little is known about either of these painters, and only a few works thus far can be conclusively attributed to them; their continued presence at the Qianlong court as well as at the Jiaqing court remains unexplored. Although the Society was restored in 1814, just one year after Poirot’s death, the Jesuits would never regain their earlier influence, and their artistic presence at the Qing court ended with him, thereby also ending this unsurpassed period of Qing court use of European pictorial techniques in the service of the state.
Even with the High Qing imperial court’s clear approval of European artists and their skills, some Chinese artists maintained the literati criticism of their illusionistic paintings in particular, including Zou Yigui (1686–1772), who painted for the court alongside the Jesuits. In 1756, he commented,
The Westerners are good at geometry, therefore their paintings depict light and shade, nearness and distance, without missing the tiniest detail. All the figures, structures, and trees in their paintings have shadows cast by the sun. Their colors and brushes are completely different from the Chinese. They paint shadows from the widest point to the narrowest, calculated using triangles. When they paint palace rooms on walls, it makes you almost wish to walk inside. Students could adopt one or two [of these techniques], and thus catch [the viewer’s] attention with this method. However, it is completely devoid of brushwork, and although skillful is merely artisanal. Consequently, this is not art.100
Zou notes the mathematical foundation of the works, particularly the role of geometry in creating the impressive effects of shadow and spatial recession, and perhaps even implies some astronomical observation by noting the presence of “shadows cast by the sun” (riying). The necessity of both technique and technical knowledge in creating these illusions is the basis for why Zou emphatically belittles the resulting paintings as not being art (huapin, literally “paintings of quality”). Because Zou considered brushwork, and by implication its inherent self-expressiveness, the essential element that defined a work not only as art, but also as a specifically Chinese work of art (in direct contrast to the
