(hue changes on comparable objects suggest the darker object is fartheraway);
shadows (the position, distortion, and shape of shadows indicate relative
location);
reflectance and scattering (the amount of reflected or scattered light varies
relative to light source and viewer).23
With such depth cues employed in them, scenic illusions do not constitute a failure of normal perception; rather, they result from perfectly normal perceptual capabilities functioning as they should, but producing a nonstandard percept.24 The responses of
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chinese viewers to European art consistently demonstrate that they were able to see the illusions in those paintings, indicating the legibility of most Western pictorial depth cues in the High Qing visual world despite a painting history that did not privilege such representations. However, the act of picturing now looked different than it did before, raising the question of how Chinese visuality was also changing in response to sustained contact with European representational modes. Broadly defined as the social aspect of vision, visuality is useful as a heuristic device to investigate the relationship between vision and representation in cross-cultural contexts.25 When approached in this way, evidence demonstrates there is no single early modern visuality derived from any particular place (including Europe), and that perhaps the only shared value across early modern visuality is its willingness to engage the foreign.26 That willingness varied somewhat with class and social status in early modern China, but there is no question that Western techniques affected Chinese visuality in ways that have yet to be fully understood.
Among the depth cues found in scenic illusion paintings, the importance of linear perspective is particularly clear in Spring’s Peaceful Message. When faced with a perspectival painting, the viewer interprets apparent distance and depth through the perceived position of objects relative to the horizon line and to the apex of the visual angle (the angle at which a viewed object subtends at the eye). In other words, the closer to the horizon and visual angle, the farther away an object appears, especially when size constancy is also at work. To create the impression of a room that recedes away from the viewer, Spring’s Peaceful Message uses pavimento, a common Renaissance pictorial device in which the straight lines of a tiled or paved floor create the orthogonals of linear perspective receding to its single vanishing point. Linear perspective was entirely intelligible to Chinese viewers; however, chiaroscuro and obvious shading failed spectacularly as depth cues because of traditional Chinese aesthetics. Chinese viewers typically interpreted dark shading and sometimes even cast shadows as dirt on the surface of a painting or as indicating dirty faces and soiled clothing. Qianlong himself vehemently disliked it, thereby ensuring its near absence in scenic illusions, where light and highlight (rather than light and shadow) lend mass and volume to objects and rooms. Figures sometimes and landscapes often cleave more to Chinese than to European conventions, as is seen in the area of the Spring’s Peaceful Message presented as outside in the garden (figure I.4), where the figures are depicted with the flatter, more surface- and line-oriented aesthetics of traditional Chinese figure painting rather than the volumetric possibilities of Western painting. The unpainted background landscape, distinctive texture strokes on the rocks and tree trunks, highly stylized plant foliage, and complete lack of either cast shadows or modeling are what one would expect in a traditional Chinese landscape painting, and not in a quadratura. Nevertheless, this blend of three-dimensional European perspectival illusionism with traditional Chinese representational modes is what ultimately helps lead the viewer to recognize the scene as a painting.
I.4Detail of figures in garden, Spring’s Peaceful Message scenic illusion (figure I.2).
Unless one is near enough to this painting to touch it, however, there are no visible brushstrokes, particularly in the area that depicts the floor, walls, and ceiling. This lack runs counter to essential aesthetic values in the traditional Chinese brush arts, which valorize the artist’s visible presence in his brushwork. However, this erasure of the artists’ identities as well as of the technology of representation perfectly suited the collaborative and therefore typically anonymous working processes of the Qing imperial painting academy (Huayuanchu). Scenic illusions were uniquely produced by the Wish-Fulfilling Studio (Ruyiguan), the separate elite branch of the painting academy where the European missionary artists worked alongside the emperor’s best Chinese and Manchu painters.27 The Wish-Fulfilling Studio’s archives (hereafter abbreviated RYG) are therefore the primary documentary source for these paintings, recording commissions, requested changes, installation locations, artists’ identities, and more that have otherwise been
lost. As scenic illusions were particular to these artists, Spring’s Peaceful Message would have been immediately identifiable as their work once the illusion had been dispelled.
Despite the important role that European pictorial techniques play in scenic illusions, neither the production of these paintings nor their definition as scenic illusions depended on the presence of European hands: Chinese Wish-Fulfilling Studio painters were producing scenic illusions on their own at least as early as 1738.28 Yet without an artist’s hand immediately visible in the brushwork, there was also no sign of brushes, pigments, or silk. By concealing the process of creation, the agency of the artist, and any material sign that scenic illusions were paintings rather than reality, these erasures initially directed the viewer’s attention to the spaces, objects, and figures depicted instead of to the depiction itself, allowing the paintings to appear to become what they represented.
As Qianlong would have seen it through the doorway in figure I.1, the illusion of Spring’s Peaceful Message is compelling because everything in it appears to be part of the viewer’s world, and therefore creates the desire for touch that generally accompanies illusionistic painting. The complexity of this urge that links sight and touch is increasingly resulting in interdisciplinary studies of vision, cognition, perception, neuroaesthetics, and even neuro–art history, and is essential to fathoming the relationship between psychology and physiology that underpins the perception of illusionistic paintings.29 Perceptually, the formula is simple: if an object seems to project into the viewer’s space, then it must be real, and is therefore touchable. Neuroscience has revealed that visual perception is not defined by a positivist need to either validate or disprove what we see by touching it, but is instead inseparable from the physical preparation for performing an action. It is this interdependence of perception and action that compels a viewer who sees an illusionistic work to touch it.30 The viewer has no expectation of cognitive dissonance or incoherent perception because experience teaches us to trust our senses, particularly the sense of sight. Unlike sight, concentrated in the head, the sense of touch pervades the body through the skin, the largest organ, which in the Chinese tradition was the primary “boundary of affective exchange” between the body and the world.31 As the “sensory faculty that shapes our social connections,” touch connects us physically with others in the myriad contact gestures that define our relationships and their varying levels of intimacy.32 In the case of the hand in particular, touch comprises both agency and receptivity in touching and being touched in return.33
Given the consistent legibility of most European pictorial depth cues in late imperial China, as well as early modern Chinese theories of vision
