1.2Scenes from Song dynasty tomb at Dengfeng, excavated 2011. From Lobell, “Song Dynasty Tomb Discovered.”
In contrast to portable painting formats, Song and Yuan murals frequently demonstrate continuity rather than disjunction between what is often distinguished as Song realism versus Yuan expressiveness,19 not least because of the trained professionals who continued to produce murals while the literati practiced the more abstract style. What few Yuan and Ming murals survive are all monumental examples from Daoist and Buddhist temples, where their two essential functions were as ritual objects and evangelical media.20 Arguably the most famous Daoist murals are the thirteenth- and fourteenth- century examples from Shanxi of an imperial-style audience with the celestial court of Daoist deities, in front of which a priest would visualize his transcendence from the human realm into the heavens to personally present a petition to the Daoist supreme being during a court audience.21 Fully integrated with the surrounding temple architecture and often with connections to the Wu Daozi tradition, these lively murals helped facilitate the priest’s mental journey to the celestial realm in order that he could actually carry out the presentation there, rather than simply symbolically in front of paintings on earth. Like their Daoist counterparts, late imperial Buddhist temple murals presented monumental assemblages of figures: massive central Buddhas and bodhisattvas in their particular paradises, surrounded by deities, celestials, warriors, and other figures
from a diverse pantheon.22 Far larger than life-size, whether Buddhist or Daoist, these meticulously detailed and colorful works overwhelm the viewer and occupy his or her entire visual field, while some figures within their dense assemblages often engage the viewer directly from inside the painting to increase the perception of a real vision and experience of the divine. Although tomb murals eventually disappeared entirely, through the Ming and Qing dynasties temple murals continued to employ this basic combination of size, realistic detail, wall surface, and overall illusionistic presentation to create an intense visual experience.23
Despite the persistence of illusionistic murals in the Chinese cultural landscape, from very early on there was a disjunction between their popular presence and elite aesthetic responses to them. Some argue that three-dimensional modeling through tone and shading is an indigenous technique that had been part of Chinese painting since the Han dynasty; even if true, at best it was much less well developed than other qualities in painting because it was already considered to be of lesser importance even at this early stage of theorization.24 The slow rise of the highly educated literati (wenren) class as the social and political elite and arbiters of aesthetic taste coincided with the growing production of portable painting formats and critical valorization of a self-consciously amateurish and deliberately abstracted style of ink painting. Admittedly, this characterization is somewhat artificial and essentializing, and recent research has demonstrated how far the reality of literati-style painting could be from its ideologies and hagiographies.25 Nevertheless, the literati painting ideal prioritized self-expression over naturalism with an established lexicon of brushwork derived from calligraphy and a limited range of subjects (most notably landscape) represented in ink and perhaps light organic colors. The literati amateur painter sought to achieve “spirit resonance” (qiyun) in his painting, and belittled the spectacularly realistic but technical “formlikeness” (xingsi or xiangxing) used by trained professional painters (such as muralists) to appeal to the uncultured public. Painting theorist Xie He (act. c. 500) codified the preeminence of spirit resonance in his Six Laws of painting, which listed this indefinable quality as the most important, followed closely by brushwork. Formlikeness was third, barely above the mundane elements of color, composition, and copying. However complicated this polarization of brushwork and expression against detail and realism has been proven to be, Xie He’s laws had a profound effect on later centuries of discourse on pictorial illusionism.
Already during Xie He’s time, some early literati deemed illusionistic murals the worst of all paintings for their reliance on formlikeness, manipulated to an extreme by professional painters, and criticized muralists as merely wall painters—artisans rather than artists. The highest praise an early muralist other than Wu Daozi could generally hope to receive was what Xie He himself granted to the temple muralists Qu Daomin and Zhang Jibo (both later fifth century), noting that their skill in architectural painting “penetrated to the divine.”26 Even the highly respected muralist Zhang Sengyou (act. late fifth to mid- sixth centuries), of whom Wu Daozi was believed to be the reincarnation,27 only “strode
beyond the multitude of artisans.”28 At worst, the comparison of a literatus, who painted as an amateur for his own enjoyment and self-cultivation, to a muralist available for hire equaled unparalleled disgrace. Yan Zhitui (531–after 591) recorded the mortification of three educated but not terribly high-ranking officials blessed with brush skills who were forced to paint murals in the Liang dynasty (502–57): “To find amusement in looking at the art objects of all times is particularly valuable and enjoyable. But, if one’s official position is not high enough, one is frequently ordered to paint for the government or for private friends, and that is disgusting service.”29 Regardless of how highly their superiors valued their skills, these men, as well as the sympathetic peer who recorded their embarrassment so acutely, were humiliated because they did not consider themselves and their skills available to command, especially not to paint such large public works that must have prioritized formlikeness.
Despite the presence and magnificence of Song illusionistic murals as seen in the tombs, this criticism only became stronger in the Northern Song dynasty. The famous Northern Song literatus Su Shi (1037–1101) was principally responsible for beginning the late imperial literati discourse of negatively characterizing both realistic and illusionistic paintings, as well as the professional artists who produced them. Despite acknowledging Wu Daozi’s unrivaled skill and unprecedented style, Su qualified the muralist’s talents only within the limited range of an artisan painter.30 The scholar and painting theorist Deng Chun (fl. 1127–67) noted in his treatise Painting, Continued (Hua ji, preface dated 1167) that even the Northern Song imperial academy painters were constrained by their professional training as well as their lack of self-cultivation: “the majority of artists, being limited by their personal characters, were bogged down in rules and techniques in their work and could not rise above the commonplace.”31 Developing their painting style in contrast to the naturalistic and meticulous court style,32 the literati community increasingly rejected the role that trained technique played in painting, which in turn affected responses to illusionistic murals.
From the Song dynasty onward, the fact that murals were found mostly in tombs and temples made them functional rather than self-expressive images, and therefore a much lower class of paintings. The muralists themselves could even be considered malevolent magicians for their skills at deceptive illusionism. Su Shi’s contemporary Guo Ruoxu (fl. 1070–75), the most influential art critic of his day, concluded his treatise Experiences in Painting (Tuhua jianwen zhi) with a vitriolic assault on “magic paintings” (shuhua). He abruptly assessed the sort of illusionistic murals that Duan Chengshi admired as the irrelevant