“technology” (jishu), which was the domain of the professionally trained muralist rather than the amateur literati painter. The magic of illusionistic murals was therefore inseparable from the techniques used to create them. Perhaps this rejection was also a means of demonstrating superior intellect: as was the case with European illusionistic paintings, the ignorant were prone to such credulousness, while the educated were less gullible, as “diffidence toward what is immediately perceived is the prerogative of the learned.”34 If scholars such as Guo Ruoxu and Su Shi wanted to distinguish their educated selves from the uneducated masses by what types of paintings they looked at and how they did so, then perhaps the Northern Song literati ability to differentiate reality from illusion in these paintings was also a key means of social differentiation.
Beginning in the late eleventh century, therefore, the importance and presence of murals were both in inexorable decline: muralists had become artisans at best and mere wall painters at worst. Growing through the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties, by the start of the Ming dynasty, connoisseurs were firmly against both murals and muralists.35 An anecdote about the literatus and painter Shen Zhou (1427–1509) reveals just how deep the divide had become. When, in order to humiliate him, one of Shen’s enemies submitted Shen’s name in response to a call for muralists to decorate the walls of a governor’s new public building, Shen’s friends encouraged him to use his connections to be excused from such “menial labor.” Shen graciously yet discreetly completed the task, but upon discovering just how large a faux pas had been committed, the governor apologized to the literatus. “You did not summon a [literatus like] Shen Zhou to paint a wall. Gentlemen did not do walls.36 What literati gentlemen like Shen Zhou did paint, and the style they used to do so, were later codified into a theory of artistic repossession of the past by painter and theorist Dong Qichang (1555–1636).37 Amid the factionalism that plagued the declining Ming court and its officials, Dong emphasized a return to brushwork doubly rooted in calligraphy and the works of certain ancient masters, thereby retroactively constructing a lineage of literati painting. Beginning with the Tang poet and painter Wang Wei (701–61), it ran through the tenth century “southern-style” landscape masters, paused during the Song emphasis on formlikeness, and picked up with Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322) to continue through the Yuan literati landscape masters and early Ming literati like Shen Zhou, and ended with Dong himself in the late Ming. The reintegration of Yuan calligraphic brushwork as ink texture strokes to model landscape forms (rather than using tone and shading) thereby produced paintings with “momentum” (shi), which was considered superior to mimesis. With calligraphy as the driving force, Dong sought a “Great Synthesis” (dacheng) of historical painting styles that privileged the calligraphic lineage of the Yuan literati over the realism of Song professional painters, all while emphasizing the contemporary Ming artist’s originality.38 This height of literati aesthetic theorization occurred at a time when elite ability to distinguish reality from illusion and true literati from those with merely literati trappings became a significant cultural practice for this same group, further linking painting practice with social differentiation.39
1.3Wang Hui, Peach Blossom Spring following Zhao Mengfu’s (1254–1322) Methods of Using Color, leaf G from Wang Hui and Wang Shiming, Landscapes after Ancient Masters, 1674 and 1677. Album leaf, ink and color on paper, 22 × 33.8 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, The Dillon Fund Gift, 1989 (1989.141.4a-rr).
With these ideas as the new orthodoxy, little more than the names of a few muralists survive from the seventeenth century. Although at this time in Hangzhou one could still see murals believed to date as far back as the Tang dynasty,40 the dominant mode of seventeenth-century painting continued Dong’s ideas as further transformed by Wang Hui (1632–1717). Under the tutelage of Dong’s leading student, Wang Shimin (1592–1680), Wang Hui became the leading orthodox landscapist of his own generation by disagreeing with the exclusive privileging of Dong’s codified lineage, but never abandoning that heritage. Consequently, he created his own inclusive Great Synthesis of the brushwork and forms characteristic of many famous historical masters to blend mimesis and calligraphy, Yuan literati abstraction and Song professional realism, and what he called the “obscure” (an) and the “obvious” (ming) into nothing short of a landscape painting revolution.41 Wang’s work in this area is exemplified by a small album leaf painting, Peach Blossom Spring Following Zhao Mengfu’s (1254–1322) Methods of Using Color (figure 1.3), in which he employs the distinctive ropy but parallel “hemp-fiber” texture strokes (pimacun) characteristic of Dong Yuan (act. 930s–60s) and reinterpreted by both Zhao Mengfu and Huang Gongwang (1269–1354) to indicate the crevices of the rounded rocks, along with the archaic Tang blue-and-green landscape painting mode that Zhao Mengfu had also reinterpreted.42 Calligraphic strokes mix with vibrant colors in a dramatic juxtaposition of historical styles that would likely have shocked Dong Qichang, as the rich green of the hills contrasts with the lively pink of the blossoming peach trees to create a vivid image of the paradigmatic fantasy realm that still owes more to historical painting references then to the actual appearance of a spring landscape.43 Blue-and-green landscapes had long been associated with “visions of paradise or an antique golden age”; the application of a historical style to this particular subject of a magical world set apart from the real world therefore further separated the depicted landscape from nature and reality.44 By synthesizing certain nonliterati elements into the literati mode in his own way, Wang Hui integrated the pictorial past with his own originality in the present, but still relied on abstracted historical styles rather than accurate depiction based on nature.
Such was the environment into which European pictures were introduced. The specific historical moments of the Tang, Northern Song, and seventeenth century exemplify just how inextricable the decline of pictorial illusionism and trained technique vis-à-vis murals are from the rise in literati painting aesthetics and values. Peaking around 1600, just as European images and representational techniques began arriving in China, such priorities could not but affect responses to European works that emphasized technique, mimesis, and illusionism—the very elements the literati explicitly rejected beginning centuries earlier. Through the Jesuits, the works they brought from Europe, and those they created in China to serve their mission, the tensions over formlikeness versus spirit resonance in art now became inflected by cultural differences as much as by social and intellectual differences.
Cultural Politics and the Early Sino-European Artistic Encounter
Although the first Europeans confirmed to have spent extended time on Chinese soil were missionaries and travelers at the Mongol Yuan court,45 and the Portuguese settled on Macau as a trading port under Ming sovereignty in the 1550s, sustained mainland Chinese contact with Europeans began only with the establishment of the Jesuit mission there in the late sixteenth century. Several different Catholic groups established missions in China, but the Jesuits were by far the most influential, and were largely responsible for the transmission of Renaissance European culture.46 Founded by St. Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556) in Rome in 1540, the Society of Jesus provided its members with unparalleled levels of polymathic education in theology, rhetoric, languages, logic, philosophy, mathematics, and science as tools for global conversion. Although they did not specifically train their novitiates in painting, leaving that to individual interests, the Society was well aware of the persuasive power of the image, and often commissioned works of art such as engravings, printed books, and oil paintings with didactic Christian subjects. The high demand of the foreign missions for images led to local Jesuit art