Even with the High Qing imperial court’s clear approval of European artists and their skills, some Chinese artists maintained the literati criticism of their illusionistic paintings in particular, including Zou Yigui (1686–1772), who painted for the court alongside the Jesuits. In 1756, he commented,
The Westerners are good at geometry, therefore their paintings depict light and shade, nearness and distance, without missing the tiniest detail. All the figures, structures, and trees in their paintings have shadows cast by the sun. Their colors and brushes are completely different from the Chinese. They paint shadows from the widest point to the narrowest, calculated using triangles. When they paint palace rooms on walls, it makes you almost wish to walk inside. Students could adopt one or two [of these techniques], and thus catch [the viewer’s] attention with this method. However, it is completely devoid of brushwork, and although skillful is merely artisanal. Consequently, this is not art.100
Zou notes the mathematical foundation of the works, particularly the role of geometry in creating the impressive effects of shadow and spatial recession, and perhaps even implies some astronomical observation by noting the presence of “shadows cast by the sun” (riying). The necessity of both technique and technical knowledge in creating these illusions is the basis for why Zou emphatically belittles the resulting paintings as not being art (huapin, literally “paintings of quality”). Because Zou considered brushwork, and by implication its inherent self-expressiveness, the essential element that defined a work not only as art, but also as a specifically Chinese work of art (in direct contrast to the Western products), his comment has been characterized as the “first time that the expressive mark was deployed in international cultural politics.”101 If Zou Yigui, a professional court painter who worked under the same rarefied Qing imperial patronage as Giuseppe Castiglione and was therefore himself not a true literati painter in the ideal sense of an independent amateur, still considered European techniques like perspective to be crafts or technical
skills rather than signs of true artistic ability, then the generally dismissive response of the literati to European works becomes even less surprising.
However, even Zou grudgingly admitted that the paintings of architectural spaces that the Western artists produced on walls were deceptive enough to make the viewer almost want to step inside. By 1756 he would certainly have seen enough scenic illusion paintings to have experienced their illusions firsthand. The fact that he specifies the subject and the painting surface in this comment is also an important indication of the presence of such works and the visual success of their illusionism in the Qing imperial milieu. Sir John Barrow also noted this in the responses of several Qing court officials to an illusionistic painting in the Perfect Brightness Garden at the end of the eighteenth century: “Gherardini painted a large colonnade in vanishing perspective, which struck [the officials] so very forcibly that they concluded he must certainly have dealings with the devil; but, on approaching the canvas and feeling with their hands, in order to be fully convinced that all they saw was on a flat surface, they persisted that nothing could be more unnatural than to represent distances where there actually neither was, nor could be, any distance.”102 In addition to providing very rare evidence of nonimperial reception of scenic illusions in the palaces, Barrow here identifies a now-lost scenic illusion installed in the primary imperial garden residence. Given Gherardini’s brief stay at the Kangxi court, the later development of scenic illusions, and the fact that Yongzheng and Qianlong (not Kangxi) developed the Perfect Brightness Garden, Barrow’s painting was more likely a later work produced on silk by the Wish-Fulfilling Studio painters.
The effects of pictorial illusionism may have unsettled Qianlong’s officials, who otherwise likely thought themselves sophisticated viewers, but Qianlong proved himself to be the superior viewer because he could enjoy the ability of European illusionistic painting techniques to deceive him into briefly seeing something other than what was actually there. Although all painting styles are two-dimensional, some—as in the literati definition of Chinese painting—draw attention to or do not try to disguise their flatness and the importance of human creative agency. Even paintings historically considered to be successfully illusionistic, such as Wu Daozi’s, often used plainly visible brush lines. But it was the lively quality of these lines or the visible presence of the artist’s personality that animated the paintings. In contrast, the European tradition of pictorial illusionism deliberately attempted to conceal the flatness of the painting surface, the hand of the artist, and the materiality of the work. Illusionistic painting can exist in any medium and on any surface, but the large, flat surfaces of walls historically offered the greatest potential for a long-lasting illusion that encompassed the viewer’s entire visual field and briefly deceived him into thinking that what he saw was real. It is this ability to understand and enjoy both the reality and the illusion simultaneously, and to delight in one’s misperception rather than be troubled by it, that enables the fullest appreciation of scenic illusion paintings.
The centuries of adverse criticism of pictorial illusionism and the decline and loss of illusionistic murals seem to have resulted in art-historical amnesia regarding the presence
and power of such paintings in China. Even the highly educated Chinese who recorded their responses to quadratura seem to have been entirely unaware of the Chinese tradition of deceptive illusionistic murals.103 Dunhuang’s Mogao Caves and Song palace murals had long been forgotten, tomb murals were out of fashion, and temple murals did not factor into the discussion; even the textual records of illusionism had been forgotten. This lapse in the Chinese art-historical memory, born largely out of literati aesthetics, is what makes the development of perspectival scenic illusion paintings at the Yongzheng court and their efflorescence at the Qianlong court seem like such a departure from the history of Chinese painting, when in fact they are inseparable from that narrative.
2.1First illustration from Nian Xiyao, The Study of Vision, 1735, The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Douce Chin. B. 2, p. 4r.
TWO
The Study of Vision
ALTHOUGH NONE OF THE SCENIC ILLUSION PAINTINGS THAT YONGZHENG commissioned are known to survive, essential evidence for illusionistic painting during his reign can be found in a woodblock-printed treatise: The Study of Vision (Shixue, 1735). In this work, the high-ranking court official Nian Xiyao (1671–1738) expanded significantly upon his initial investigation into the subject, The Essence of the Study of Vision (Shixue jingyun, 1729), which had been published only two years after the first commission for scenic illusion was recorded in the palace workshop archives. Nian was acknowledged in both eighteenth-century China and Europe as an expert in Western learning, and his personal interest in both Western mathematics and Western art met in the study of linear perspective, the geometric foundation for the complex psychological experience of misperceiving a two-dimensional painting as three-dimensional space. The product of these interests was The Study of Vision, a 149-page treatise that predominantly employs diagrams to teach the European pictorial techniques of linear perspective, foreshortening, horizontal spatial recession, and shadows as the technical substructure of Western illusionistic paintings. Woodblock-printed painting manuals played an important role in late imperial Chinese art and culture, but The Study of Vision is unique in its highly technical illustrations,