and seen historically as inferior to paintings produced freehand. The ninth-century art historian Zhang Yanyuan commented that “if one makes use of line-brush and ruler, the result will be dead painting,” and eight hundred years later, during the Kangxi reign, the late Ming individualist painter Shitao (1642–1707) shared his disapproval.42 By the early 1700s, such tools also carried Western connotations. Matteo Ripa recorded that Giovanni Gherardini’s Chinese
students still active at the Kangxi court in 1711 used straightedges to create perspective.43 The Palace Museum in Beijing still holds at least ten sets of early modern technical drawing instruments, six of which were produced in the Kangxi workshops and the others imported.44 Kangxi praised the use of such tools for craftsmen: the preface to the Elements of Calculation says that, “only artisans familiar with the square and compass manufacture exquisite work.”45 His use of the term “artisan” here, especially in a mathematical context, distinguishes the maker as a respected trained professional. However, as has been demonstrated when the same term is applied to painters, it immediately marks the products of such instruments and the training required to use them as something other than art.
By beginning with the tools, therefore, Nian also commences an uphill battle against Chinese tradition to counteract the negative perception of using such things in order to create a painting. His is a direct challenge, even specifying particular angles in The Study of Vision and demonstrating the consistent use of the technical drawing tools in creating the images. By using the first illustration in the treatise to actively promote the use of tools to create illusionistic paintings, Nian encourages the reader to focus on subjects and their effects rather than the quality of line, offering an alternative to the literati model of reading ability in distinctive visible brushwork. From the very first image, therefore, The Study of Vision defines the fundamental practices used to create Western-style illusionistic paintings as inherently different from—and even directly opposed to—those used to create Chinese paintings.
Presaging the remainder of the borrowings, Nian’s first illustration includes neither translations of Pozzo’s explanatory text (presented on the drafting board in Pozzo’s original image) nor the chiaroscuro effects in the original engraving. Perhaps Nian simply wanted to make the image as clear as possible; perhaps it was because shadows and shading were often read as dirty marks; perhaps it was because of the difficulty of recreating in Chinese woodblock printing the hatching and cross-hatching for shading that were possible in copperplate engraving.46 Whatever the reasons, these differences between Nian’s and Pozzo’s opening illustrations exemplify the stylistic differences between the two treatises. The rest of the images in the first section of The Study of Vision (4r–18v, including the first image) continue these simplified borrowings from the opening section of the Perspectiva. Unlike the Perspectiva, however, only five of the pages in this opening section contain any text, which is limited to brief instructions presented in vertical blocks on the same pages with the various points used to create lines marked with the Chinese equivalents of A, B, C, D, and so on. From page 8r onward these images are presented without explanation, leaving the reader to puzzle out their content as well as how to produce them. These direct borrowings from the Perspectiva account for the persistent mischaracterization of The Study of Vision as simply an adaptation, translation, or even copy of Pozzo’s treatise. Attributing such influence to the Perspectiva overstates its role both in Nian’s treatise and in China generally: with the exception of the visual (not textual) references to it in The Study of Vision, the Perspectiva seems to have been
otherwise unacknowledged in China at the time. Two copies of the Perspectiva were held in the Jesuits’ Beijing library at the North Church (Beitang), one published in Rome 1702–23 and one in Augsburg in 1706–19,47 but these were not the only European perspective treatises held there. While The Study of Vision certainly borrowed some illustrations from the Perspectiva, it also borrowed from other treatises, and never acknowledges either its textual or pictorial sources. The European treatises that can be visually linked to The Study of Vision were merely frameworks to be built upon in the service of a new style of painting.
The “image-led graphic instruction and design ideas” of the Perspectiva have been credited as the reasons for its international spread with the global Jesuit missions throughout Europe, to the Americas, and to Goa and China.48 The extremely low text-to-image ratio in The Study of Vision has even led to suggestions that the Perspectiva illustrations were self-explanatory to non-European viewers; such suggestions presume dangerously that both the style and the content were legible. The Study of Vision has therefore been promoted as syncretic evidence that Pozzo’s illustrations broke through language barriers to function as legible didactic images that signified clearly regardless of the texts that accompanied them.49 Such an assessment overlooks the fact that promoting this particular treatise, produced by one of their own fully professed members, would naturally have been in the Jesuits’ best interests in China, particularly after proselytization was prohibited. Furthermore, while the subjects, representational styles, and pictorial techniques of the Perspectiva were likely more legible to Nian due to his training in Western mathematics and art, even he was not immune to misinterpreting them, as later illustrations will show.
Many of the illustrations that Nian borrowed from the Perspectiva are in fact quite far from self-explanatory in his presentation, even when accompanied by text. An example comes early in the first section, in the illustration describing the method for projecting a pedestal in perspective (7r, figure 2.3), the eighth figure in the Perspectiva. Again depicted in a simplified outline mirror reversal from Pozzo’s original, Nian’s illustration is divided into four parts. At the top left is the geometrical elevation of the pedestal; below is the geometrical plan of the base. Dotted lines connect the two views, linking the two figures as two views of a single object. In the top half of the larger main part of the illustration, the geometrical elevation is rotated ninety degrees into a foreshortened view of the side of the column, with the orthogonals of the resulting perspective elevation and plan extending sharply up to the vanishing point (zhengtoudian) at the top right corner. The bottom portion of the illustration presents the completed outline projection of the pedestal with a horizon line behind it, situating the pedestal base on a ground plane, as it appears to have two sides that recede horizontally into the distance and extend vertically in space.
In contrast to Pozzo’s lengthy instructions accompanying his version of the image, Nian’s directions simply read, “First draw the base; next draw the main face; then draw the side face. [With] the dimensions of the four surrounding [sides] all prepared, therefore, completing the figure should not be vexing or confusing, but certain. This is the same method as in the previous square figure; similar figures can be inferred. Everything can
2.3How to create a pedestal in perspective. From Nian Xiyao, The Study of Vision. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Douce Chin. B. 2, p. 7r.
be done [this way], it is not a difficult method.” Nian’s instructions here simply assume that the object (which he does not identify as a pedestal), its three-dimensional representation, and the method for constructing the final form in space are not only implicitly comprehensible, but also recognizably adaptable to more advanced forms. His faith in his reader’s abilities here seems rather optimistic: the instructions for projecting the pedestal in perspective are the last ones in this opening section of The Study of Vision, which continues with twenty-three additional illustrations adapted from the Perspectiva that mostly depict projections of columns and capitals in the same manner as figure 2.3. The Perspectiva includes lengthy instructions and explanations for all of these, clearly demonstrating
