In 1582, only one year before the painting seminary opened in Japan, Matteo Ricci, S.J. (Li Madou, 1552–1610), established the Jesuit mission in China. For the remainder of the Ming dynasty, this mission sought to reconcile Christianity and European technical knowledge with scholarly Confucianism in order to appeal to the scholar-official class, whose dress Ricci adopted as the standard Jesuit costume in China. Ricci regularly used religious prints and paintings as evangelical tools, and requested that his superiors
in Rome send large masterpieces as well as a European painter capable of producing such works. Although the painter never arrived, leaving Ricci to rely on Niccolò-trained artists, some paintings and numerous prints were sent, becoming the first examples of post-Renaissance European art to circulate in China as well as the foundation for the illustrations in Jesuit-sponsored printed books.48
The Jesuit Jerome Nadal’s (1507–80) famous Evangelicae historiae imagines ex ordine Evangeliorum quae toto anno in Missae Sacrificio recitantur (printed in Antwerp between 1593 and 1595) became the source for the two best-known illustrated books that the Jesuits printed in seventeenth-century China, which are the first clear examples of the blending of Chinese and European representational methods that would later characterize Qing court painting. Rules for Reciting the Rosary (Song nianzhu guicheng, c. 1619–23) is credited to Gaspar Ferreira, S.J. (Fei Qigui, 1571–1649), and João da Rocha, S.J. (Luo Ruwang, 1583–1623), and Illustrated Explanation of the Incarnation of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu jiangsheng chuxiang jingjie, 1637) to Giulio Aleni, S.J. (Ai Rulüe, 1592–1649).49 It is important to note that only Nadal’s images were transferred, and not the technology of copperplate engraving with which his book was printed. Both of these Chinese books are woodblock printed, taking advantage of the highly developed printing industry that played such an important role in late Ming visual culture, but it is unclear whether Ferreira, da Rocha, and Aleni were themselves responsible for the illustrations in the books, as the identities of the artists, block carvers, and printers are unknown. However, the diverse ways in which these illustrations combine Chinese and European pictorial devices provide concrete examples of how the artists, whomever they might have been, were integrating new and established conventions.
Depicting the Annunciation (figure. 1.4), the first illustration in Rules for Reciting the Rosary is one of only two illustrations in the book set in an identifiably Chinese environment appropriate for a literati scholar-official. Although the Virgin and the angel wear Western-style robes consistent with the foreign costumes found throughout the book, the scene occurs in an unmistakably Ming private home, in a room elegantly furnished with a daybed and a tall four-legged table that the Virgin uses as a prie-dieu. The room opens onto a garden, only just visible at the left side of the image, in which banana plants identify the scene as set in southeastern China, the literati heartland. Behind the Virgin is not, as might appear at first glance, a view onto the surrounding landscape, but rather a large standing screen with an ink painting in the sparse style of Yuan literati landscape master Ni Zan (1302–74). This would have been an ideal and highly valued painting for a literatus to own, especially given the importance of Ni Zan in orthodox landscape painting and as a model literatus. Rather than closing off the image, however, the representation of the screen painting, with its characteristic Ni Zan composition split between foreground and background over a visible distance, serves to deepen the sense of interior space in the overall scene. The background mountains are depicted on a smaller scale than the rocks and dead tree in the foreground, which, along with the blank paper visible
between them, suggests a vast distance. Although the architecture, figures, and landscapes in Rules for Reciting the Rosary are not generally sinicized, the pictorial conventions in the illustrations are consistently Chinese: neither shading nor cast shadows suggest mass or volume; figures do not diminish in size with distance from the viewer; and space does not recede horizontally, as with linear perspective, but rather vertically up the picture plane in isometric perspective. Relying on a Chinese model for spatial recession, therefore, the Ni Zan–style landscape in this first image is an elegant pictorial compromise to suggest deep space with an image that would have been immediately familiar to the literati the Jesuits sought to convert. The entire scene therefore demonstrates that Christianity was entirely commensurate with literati lifestyle and culture.
Using a different approach, Aleni’s Illustrated Explanation typically incorporates shading, size changes, and horizontal recession, together with a variation on the “image-above-text- below” (shangtu xiawen) format and the presentation of multiple narrative moments in a single image that were common in late imperial Chinese woodblock-printed fiction.50 How the Illustrated Explanation integrates these period printing conventions together with single-point perspective is seen in “Washing the Feet of the Disciples at the Last Supper” (figure 1.5). The haloed Christ appears three times in this continuous narrative, which proceeds from left to right in the European mode of reading, rather than from right to left, as was common in Chinese books and horizontal scroll paintings. The key elements of these three moments are ordered using Chinese characters, and differentiated by setting each moment in a different architectural space on a different scale. The smallest section of the image, at the top left, shows the meal itself with the disciples seated around the radiant Christ; Christ then leads his disciples into the room at the bottom left in the extreme foreground; and in the largest section of the image he remonstrates with Peter over his reluctance to allow Christ to wash his feet. The figures diminish dramatically in size with their distance from the viewer, and although shading in this image is subtly limited to architecture and furniture, other illustrations in the book show even more modeling through shading (although not on any of the figures themselves) as well as cast shadows.
The tiled floor on which Christ kneels offers the viewer visual entry into the image at the eponymous moment in the narrative. The orthogonals of the tiles recede horizontally away from the viewer to terminate behind the seated disciples at an incongruous folding screen with a landscape painting in isometric perspective, surrounded by more traditional ink plum and bamboo. The landscape on the screen initially seems to extend the space of the room, as a window onto a background landscape might, and repeats the Annunciation illustration’s use of an identifiably Chinese landscape painting to create this effect. But with its abrupt application of isometric perspective in the space where a vanishing point should be, the folding landscape screen is a blunt insertion of a Chinese pictorial convention within the otherwise predominantly European representational treatment. One can only speculate why the artist chose to include a Chinese-style landscape and painting format in just this particular space and scene. Perhaps it was because the narrative occurs
1.4Joao da Rocha, S.J.,
“The Annunciation.” Woodblock
print. From Rules for Reciting
the Rosary, 1619. The Getty
Research Institute, Los Angeles
(1374-445).
in a private home, as does the Annunciation, and therefore a screen painting would not have been out of place as meaningful ornament underlining the homeowner’s identity. Or perhaps it was an alternative to the dark, curtained wall shaded with cross-hatching in the original European image, which would have been difficult to replicate legibly in woodblock prints. Other illustrations in the Chinese text demonstrate