Imperial Illusions. Kristina Kleutghen

When Giuseppe Castiglione arrived in Beijing more than ten years after Gherardini’s departure, little could Kangxi have realized just how profoundly illusionistic Western painting would come to affect Qing court art.

      European Artists and Pictorial Illusionism at the High Qing Court

      In January 1707, the Society of Jesus registered the nineteen-year-old Milanese painter Giuseppe Castiglione as a “novice coadjutor assigned to the Chinese Province.”⁹¹ Castiglione shared several traits with Giovanni Gherardini: both were trained professional painters; neither was ordained as a priest (Castiglione remained a lay brother throughout his Jesuit career, as was common for professionals who joined the order as grown men); both developed their painting from the same Bolognese tradition of illusionistic perspectival painting; and both followed master quadraturisti. Castiglione’s professional artistic training was likely conducted within a workshop, and he claimed to work in the tradition of Jesuit quadraturista Andrea Pozzo, although there is no evidence of direct studentship.⁹² In 1709, Castiglione was transferred to Coimbra, Portugal, in preparation for his departure to China from Lisbon, but royal painting commissions delayed that departure until April 1714. The Coimbra paintings have disappeared, but Castiglione’s own few letters and other textual records show that he painted portraits for the royal family as well as quadratura depicting perspectival stairs and illusionistic foliage in the chapel of St. Francis Borgia in the Jesuit College.⁹³ Precisely during that period, the Portuguese Jesuit mathematician and

      professor Inácio Vieira (1678–1739) produced his own treatises on optics and perspective by studying the image distortions found in quadratura.⁹⁴ Although the effects of Castiglione’s five years in Portugal on his paintings produced for the Qing emperors remain unexplored, Portugal seems to have proven a particularly fertile environment in which Castiglione honed his skills in perspective and monumental illusionism required for quadratura that would ultimately lead to the development of scenic illusions in China.

      Castiglione arrived in Beijing in 1715, taking up his post at the same time as the climax of the Chinese Rites controversy, which had a significant impact on the missionary artists at the Qing court. The Jesuit policy of acculturation and accommodation, which originated in Asia with Alessandro Valignano’s work at the short-lived Japanese mission, manifested itself in China through the Jesuits’ adoption of the dress, language, and customs of the educated elite, including the use of scholarly Confucian terms and concepts to explain Christianity. In 1692, although Kangxi himself had not converted, he issued an edict of toleration for Christianity, and promoted an atmosphere of liberalism and intellectual exchange. Other Catholic groups evangelizing in China in the seventeenth century, including the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians, vehemently disagreed with the Jesuit acculturation policy and refused to adopt Chinese cultural customs. This extended even to the very terms used to name the divine: the Jesuits permitted the traditional Chinese terms tian (heaven) and Shangdi (God, literally, “Supreme Emperor”) be used for these Christian concepts, but the other groups did not, preferring the neologism Tianzhu (Lord of heaven) for God. Furthermore, they argued that the essential Chinese practice of ancestor veneration, common to both elite Confucian customs as well as traditional folk beliefs, was incompatible with Christianity in general and the First Commandment in particular. In contrast, the Jesuits argued that ancestor veneration was more a social custom than a sacred rite, and that the veneration of Confucius was a civil matter. They promoted the successes achieved by their acculturation policies as evidence in support of their position, successes that also incited envy among their missionary competition for achieving a Christian China. The result of these divisions was the Chinese Rites controversy, which peaked in 1715 when Pope Clement XI (r. 1700–21) issued the bull Ex illa die, which reinforced a 1704 decree that Chinese ancestor worship and Confucian rituals conflicted with Catholic teaching. Henceforth, Pope Clement declared, these ancient customs were prohibited among Chinese converts.

      Declaring this unacceptable and nonsensical, the previously tolerant Kangxi banned Christian evangelism in China in 1721, but allowed the Jesuits to stay on at his court as respected teachers and advisors. Kangxi’s successor, Yongzheng, took a more aggressive stance: he banned Catholicism outright at the beginning of his reign, ordered all Chinese Christians to renounce their foreign faith, and expelled all missionaries to Macau except those directly serving the court in technical capacities. Yongzheng’s division of the missionaries in this way enabled Castiglione to stay on as a court artist, and he later began to paint for Yongzheng’s fifth son, the prince Hungli. When Hungli ascended the throne

      as the Qianlong emperor in 1736, the established relationship between ruler and painter deepened into favored patronage for the Italian. Castiglione, a respected master court painter specializing in portraiture, served Qianlong faithfully as a painter, painting teacher, and architect until his death in 1766, when Qianlong buried the Italian in Beijing and posthumously promoted him to vice-minister (shilang). This unprecedentedly high rank for a foreigner demonstrated the ruler’s esteem and personal affection for both the man and his artistic talents that served three High Qing emperors over more than fifty years.

      Although Castiglione was unquestionably a significant influence on Qing court painting, and almost certainly the most talented European artist to serve these emperors, he has rather overshadowed the five European colleagues and the many Chinese colleagues with whom he served in Qianlong’s Wish-Fulfilling Studio. Perhaps the best known after Castiglione is the French Jesuit Jean-Denis Attiret (Wang Zhicheng, 1702–68), who arrived in 1737 and whose numerous letters back to French colleagues were published in the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, most importantly his 1742 letter describing the Perfect Brightness Garden.⁹⁵ The other four artists are much less known. The Bohemian Jesuit Ignatius Sichelbarth (Ai Qimeng, 1708–80) arrived in 1745 and is best known for his paintings of dogs; the Italian Augustine Giovanni Damasceno Salusti (An Deyi, d. 1781) is also best known for paintings of dogs. The Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Panzi (Pan Tingzhang, d. before 1812) and the French Jesuit Louis de Poirot (He Qingtai, 1735–1813) both arrived in 1771, several years after Castiglione’s death.⁹⁶ Regardless of when they arrived at court, these men worked side by side with their non-European colleagues, such as Yao Wenhan (act. 1743–c. 1773), Jin Tingbiao (act. mid-eighteenth century), Ding Guanpeng (c. 1708–71), Shen Yuan (act. mid-eighteenth century), and Castiglione’s students, including Zhang Weibang (act. c. 1726–61), Wang Youxue (act. c. 1733–80s), Wang Ruxue (act. mid–late eighteenth century), and the Manchu Ilantai (act. c. 1750s–90s).⁹⁷

      Qianlong maintained an active role in his painting academy, particularly the elite branch of the Wish-Fulfilling Studio, and was familiar enough with each man’s particular talents to request specific artists for particular projects. Typically, he would first commission one or more artists to produce a draft of a painting intended for a specific location and later comment personally on that draft, often requesting changes before finally approving it for execution and ultimately approving the finished work.⁹⁸ Following standard practice, the men of the Wish-Fulfilling Studio frequently collaborated on commissions, each contributing his individual talents in painting faces, robes, architecture, landscape, flowers, and so on to create the “best” overall work (although not necessarily the most stylistically cohesive). Often their extant works are unsigned: rarely do the many collaborative works in the Qing imperial collection display the names of the many hands involved in them, but sometimes attributions can be established from the painting academy archives. These archives also reveal that many works signed only by Castiglione were in fact produced by several artists. Careful consideration, therefore, should be given to any painting attributed solely to him.⁹⁹

      Despite the Jesuits’ consistent and successful missionary activity throughout the eighteenth century, in 1773 Pope Clement XIV (r. 1769–74) issued a bull formally suppressing the Society of Jesus and its members. Giuseppe Panzi and Louis de Poirot, having arrived only two years earlier, stayed on as painters at the Qing court well into the Jiaqing reign. Poirot also served as a translator and continued