Let me start with a kind of general position, which is by proving that well-known figure, but maybe not well-known as an art historian.
Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush's secretary of state, who famously said, well, there are known knowns.
The things we know, we know are the known unknowns, the things that we know, we don't know.
And then there are the unknown unknowns. That is the things that we don't even know, that we don't know them.
And he probably didn't invent it.
But I think there's some interesting parallels. And so it's it's a kind of mental framework that you can apply to all things.
So I think we want to start that beginning by thinking that the painting of mentalistic China,
that is the China from thirteen sixty eight to 16, 44 is a topic that we know a lot about.
We know a lot of biography because we have a lot of factual painting surviving from
the main period and we've got lots of writing about painting from the Ming people.
It's a well-documented era of Chinese history.
So there are kind of quite a lot of things that we knew we don't know, or we only have kind of tiny tip of the iceberg.
So, for example, we just take one example. We don't know anything as much as we might like to know about the economic aspects of Ming painting,
like how much did a painting cost if we went to a professional artist and wanted a picture?
How much did it cost? We know that pictures that were professional artists that you go on commission things.
We have some of those things, but we don't know how. We don't exactly know what the prices are.
And this is a contrast, if you like, to what we knew about European painting at the same time where because of the kind
of notarial system that particularly Italians used in the 15th and 16th century,
we got lots of contractors. We don't have a single mediumistic contract.
On the other hand, you've got other kinds of things from Ming Dynasty, China, that we don't have from the 15th and 16th century Europe.
We've got large amounts of personal correspondence by artists and we've got large amounts of
writing by artists that vastly out to dwarf anything that exists from Europe in the same period.
So that kind of how much should a picture cost? That would be in my account of Rumsfeld here?
No, no, no. That is a topic we know. We don't know very much about.
But then there are the question of the kind of the unknown unknowns.
And that might be a theme that runs through this, that we might kind of begin to grope towards some of the things that we think.
OK. We're only just beginning to realise that this is a topic that we don't know very much about.
Now, the man period.
Thirteen. Sixty eight. Sixteen. Forty four in Chinese history.
I think one of the reasons that one can do this, of course, there's plenty of painting that survives from prior to the main period.
And I'm just showing you two more or less randomly chosen, but very wonderful premium painting.
So we have actual painting from the. But we have it in very much smaller quantities.
And we only have certain kinds of it.
I think one of the things that makes it feasible to do a series on painting and culture in the main period and as opposed to,
say, painting in culture in the time period of painting in the culture, in some period you could do it.
But the quantity of surviving evidence is very much less and very much more limited.
We we. Let me just make another general point about the survival of material evidence for the past, because that's what we're dealing with here.
We're not just I suppose this applies to textual evidence as well.
I think I'm applying it here to material, which is that let's take as a basic premise that most of what was done in the past is lost.
All right. Actually, what we have is a very small percentage of what was done in the past, but it's not an equal percentage fees.
We don't simply have five percent of everything that was done in the past.
We might have 10 or 15 or 20 percent of certain kinds of.
Things that were done and we might have won or nought point five or even more, scarily zero percent have some other kinds of things.
So when I say painting survives in relatively large quantities from the mean period, I want to lay down right the beginning.
I don't think that we've got, you know, five percent of the Ming painting.
We might have, you know,
seven or eight percent of certain kinds of things that we might have nought point one or even zero percent of certain other kinds of things.
And one of the things I'd be doing in this series is drawing attention to if you're like Ray or survive office, where, you know,
we might have one surviving example of something that may once have existed in very large,
much larger numbers, larger numbers than the things which survive now in bigger numbers.
So survival today is not a sound basis on which to judge quantity or importance or presence within the culture, the past.
And that's a very important kind of basic premise. So we don't have an equal survival of everything, even from the main period.
Let me just give you one example of where I think the unequal survival.
Half a million park was a big place. It had a population of about 150 million.
In the 16th century, similar to the population of the whole of Europe at the same time.
It's geographically very large from north to south to be about as long to get from Beijing.
Wong Jo down in the south as it would take you in the 16th century to get from Vienna to London or crack off to London.
So it's over. It's a very, very big place. But I would say that the evidence that survives or it's not just the evidence that survives,
but the evidence that history and art history has most intensively drawn on is geographically skewed,
is skewed towards one area of the media empire, and that's the region known in Chinese as Jonathan,
which means the region south of the Yangzi, which you maintain as the townsmen.
Not everything sounds of the Yangtze River, but this area here shown in my in my flow up here, which is, you know, blown up again.
This area at the mouth, really.
The Yangtze Delta is is one way of thinking about this area was economically the most developed and the empire was the most heavily populated.
It was the most heavily urbanised. It was the most heavily commercialised.
And it's the site of many of the major cities that are going to come off as names in the subsequent lectures.
But as I said, the main empire is a big place and there's been a considerable concentration of scholarly attention on this area.
And one of the things that we need to think about is what's happening, what's happening in the rest of this very large space.
And are the generalisations about mean painting that one might mean?
Are they really generalisations which apply across this large imperial space,
or are they distinctive to this highly commercialised, highly organised area at the mouth of the Yangtze?
So that's just one example of the way in which our study of the period is kind of is kind of skewed.
Now, let just off for a brief kind of justification for for kind of studying painting as a topic.
This is not something I'm reading back into the period.
Painting, if you like, is a topic that people in the Ming Dynasty would have recognised themselves as as a theme,
a topic, a suitable object for study, a discourse, if you like.
The Chinese word that I'm using is all painting.
It forms part of a number of components in Chinese.
One of the most important that it forms is the compound for calligraphy and painting.
And let me just mark our cards that it's simple. The order there is important because if you like, in terms of a hierarchy of esteem,
of which kinds of cultural practise are more important, calligraphy is more important than paint.
You don't have to be a painter to be an educated person in the main period.
You don't even have to be interested in painting at all.
But if your calligraphy, your handwriting, your production of script with it, with the writing.
Is deficient. That's a black mark against you and certainly against your claims to be a person of culture or status or or or dignity in the moon,
they would have used the term block,
which means something like the field of painting in the sense that, you know, I'm using that in the sense of BUJU as a field of cultural production.
Quite often means kind of everyth painting and everything to do with it and is a term that would encompass the actual making of painting,
the trading and painting, writing about painting, discussing painting.
So the term plotline is, if you like, the meaning tone for what I'm calling painting culture in China.
It's a term which is modelled on an even older term.
Shenkar the field point is everything to do poetry and everything to do with it.
And the fact that the poetry comes out loud,
I think again reflects the fact that in terms of a hierarchy of cultural practises within the main period,
poetry is more important than painting as well.
You have to you have to have an interest in poetry or knowledge or poetry in order to countries a present educated person.
Now, here's a quote that I've used in books and that people have drawn attention to,
which possibly helps us to understand some of how people, some of whom some people thought about painting in the make period.
This is a quote from a writer who Louisiana, himself a painter,
born in the late May period and living through the transition between the Ming and Ching periods, which took place in the 16th 40s.
He said in ancient times there were pictures and he uses the word, too.
But no paintings for pictures depict objects, portray people or transcribe events.
As for paintings, the same isn't necessarily true. One uses a good brush in anti kink and execute siege on a piece of old paper.
As for the things in a painting, they are cloudy hills and misty groves, precipitous boulders and cold waterfalls.
Plank bridges and rustic houses may maybe figures or new figures to insist on some specific subject or the representation of some event.
These very low class right now.
This distinction, if you like, between pictures, which kind of depicts stuff I'm painting,
which is about, if you like, the expression of the artist, but not about depicting an outside world.
And the idea that the distinction between these is a kind of class distinction is one that has been made quite a lot of in the literature,
in the secondary literature and the contemporary secondary literature and on Chinese painting, not least by me, you know, I mean in a book.
But one rethinks things.
And one of the things I'm kind of currently rethinking is the extent to which this is a safe guide to the practise of the period.
This distinction between pictures and paintings is vocalised, if you like, here in the 17th century.
But is it safe to assume that it goes a whole lot farther back?
I suppose the kind of things that he might use by two is let us just remind ourselves that
there are all sorts of pictures in the being period that are definitely not paintings.
So this porcelain vase from the 16th century definitely has a picture on it, but that's not a painting.
This printed book has a picture.
Any good illustration. But that's not that's not a painting either.
You could say that this is in histones in common sense terms.
In the 17th century, the 15th century picture is a picture and not a painting.
It's an anonymous war during Paris, women and children celebrating the new year.
It's the colour over very heavily faded. It's a figure of subject.
And it's definitely if we go back to him, you know, the representation of some specific event shows women and children,
if you like, decorating the house form for the new year festive.
So arguably, we would say that in one sense terms this is a picture and not a painting.
Anonymous, specific subject, finger painting.
It's of lower class. And I think the fact that he's I'll come back to some of the gender issues of
something like this in subsequent lectures with the relationship of kind of
lower class and gender female in this kind of theorising around painting pictures
is something that we need to we need to kind of be constantly aware of.
But on the other hand, is this is this absolutely.
This distinction between pictures and painting that is vocalised in the 17th century isn't necessarily readable back what might well be 200 years,
200 years. And I just think one clue is one of the things that women are doing here.
This detail shows a woman pasting up a picture of quite possibly a printed picture rather than rather than something done by hand.
And it's a kind of an I'm one of the things you do at New Year's put out particular kinds of pictures of particular gods who defend
the household against sort of dangerous and noxious elements that might be around in the cosmos as they as the year termism.
And the site of the cosmic cycle kind of moves from one year into another.
But these things are always called even when they're printed the in the.
Well. New York paintings or New Year pictures.
And I think the use of that term should. Remind us for saying that this distinction between picture and painting may not be as far as definite,
as safe as the polemical position of guns and put out in the in the 17th century.
So maybe the category is a bit more fuzzy at the edges than some of the literature, including some of the literature by me makes it sound.
It's worth remembering that even for the elite, painting is a practise in, amongst other practises.
It kind of fits in with other things. It's not been a completely separate place myself.
And I'm showing you here a set of four paintings all the same size.
In reality, I've just blown one of them off a bit bigger and four paintings from about fifteen hundred showing what are often referred to as
the four the four gentlemanly pursuits or the four pastimes of of the educated male member of the elite teens who want zero play.
Playing the zither. The fortunes are a musical instrument that really made that play.
Playing chess, calligraphy and paint.
All right. So here's the appearance.
Paying attention right at the beginning to something which is kind of, if you like, slightly distinctive about this.
You know, the Victorian representation of what these four pastimes, chin, a gentleman playing this chess, gentleman playing chess calligraphy,
gentlemen executing calligraphy, painting, a gentleman looking at a painting like he's not doing a painting.
You're not actually painting. He's looking at a painting.
And it's the only one of the four which is about, if you like, observing the activity rather than rather than carrying out the activity.
Does this tell us something about the kind of position of painting within the total realm of elite culture?
That's something that will kind of come back to now.
I just want to be in this very first lecture run through.
This may be very, very familiar to some of you, but run through some of the what you might call formal aspects of my painting.
What are these objets these things that we're kind of dealing with?
Let me use this as a starting point. And I'll just point out for those of you actually taking a special subject,
here's a reminder that if the background of my slide is this eye popping sheet,
you know, that means that we're looking at one of the prescribed images within that, if you like.
This is a set of images with students taking this course are kind of required to be familiar.
So that's why the background of my slides changes from a restful pale blue to an eye popping yellow at certain points.
Let's start with this picture dated 14 37.
It's a detail of a much, much larger picture, a point which I would term, but it shows a gentleman looking at that picture.
The painting that they're looking at is in the format of a hanging scroll.
That is, it is longer than it is. Why is they held up here?
Have our servant. Then this gentleman who is studying this is holding it in his hands.
I find a lot of pictures of gentleman looking at pictures now. I'll certainly mention them again.
And as we go along. But it's kind of interesting in that it also gives us a sense of some of the other formal aspects,
which is how, if you like, pictures are are produced.
Just to remind ourselves, the two principal surfaces on which Chinese painting is done are silk paper.
Things that we'll be looking at are either painted on sale or they're painted on paper.
They're painted with a brush brush, which is essentially the same in its construction as the brush,
which is used in writing from the production of the characters of the Chinese language.
And all of the colours that are used, there's a wide range of colours.
Some of them are mineral colour. Some of them are vegetable colours. But it's all there, all in a water based medium.
So essentially, everything we're looking at is a watercolour. It's therefore susceptible to fading.
And therefore,
one of the things we just have to bear in mind is that almost every main picture is not as bright as it was when it was first painting this picture.
Not my shows, just looking at. But here are, if you like, the tools of the trade.
This gentleman here has the brush in his hand. He's poised to write something on a sheet of paper.
Probably a comment to record what these gentlemen, the act of connoisseurship in which they're looking at this painting together.
The other thing I'd just draw attention to in this one is that this is a social activity.
This is not a solitary activity. The act of looking at these pictures is something that the gentlemen are doing together.
And there's this kind of interaction between them.
So he's looking at a hanging school. But I think it's all. Here's another hanging score.
And that's the tone one uses in English for these are different times in Chinese for the different formats these days.
This does a high school in English. It's just worth remembering that there's a great variability of size in sports.
The effect of of the classroom effect is to flatten everything to the same scale.
So things either. There's this one, in fact, is very much larger in reality than it appears on this on this slide.
But some of the things that I'm sure you are very much smaller in reality are, if you like, blowing up.
So it's quite a big variability in in size.
And remember that there's no technical reason for this paper in the media as
the sheets could be joined together to make the surface for large school silk.
Silk could be joined together in by law to be kind of quite large.
And so the reason why school is big or small is not to do with technical aspects.
It must be to do with the choice of the artist. The context for which it's made, et cetera, et cetera.
So there has to be a kind of a reason for this.
There's recently been a kind of interesting argument which says that in general, schools are getting smaller through history.
That is in the 10th, 11th century, by and large, Chinese schools were very big and and they got smaller.
And I'm I'm slightly suspicious of that because what they're really saying is
that most of the schools that survive from the earlier periods are big ones.
And that's, again, about the survival of evidence.
We don't know, for example, may maybe many smaller things in our periods, but it certainly was observable that in the Ming.
There is a considerable variation in the size of a hanging scroll.
And as we've seen, you know, if you go back to this one, a high school can hang on a wall.
But just Doumar her column here. That's not necessarily the only way in which it's going to be viewed.
It may well be viewed in this kind of context for a servant is holding it up on a stick.
Now, I haven't really got a lot of time to kind of go into these technical aspects, so I'm kind of whizzing through the other great format.
The other major format used in the main period is what it's called in English hand school or horizontal scroll.
And that's something that rules this week. Again, there's a variation in scale of landfilled or not so much variation in scale size.
The biggest handspring tends to be about that high and the smallest one tends to be about that.
So there's no space in that way. But of course, the variation that we can be enormous and some of them are 90 feet long.
I mean, there are there are some that are smaller. This one's Victoria's office about that size.
But some of them can be 30, 40, 50 feet long. And they can be they can be they can be very big.
This photograph is an unusual photograph in terms of what you'll see in terms of Chinese painting books,
because it shows you the whole physical object. What you tend to see in a painting, paintings in books is just, if you like, a pictorial surface.
That's worth remembering that a Chinese scroll, a hanging school of hands for both physical Three-Dimensional objects that require manipulation.
They take up space and here a handsaw. This one's been unrolled.
And then these wooden blocks that you see here hold down.
If the kind of the ordinary portion and the continued portion of the person may be more here.
And in this case, there is there isn't more painting. Was a great year for writing here in the form of coliforms, subsequent comments,
people comments by people who've seen this painting through history since it was painted in 50/50.
Going on through the 16th century, 18th, 19th centuries.
There very little written about what you might call these these physical aspects and the freemen of of Chinese painting.
The only book really about Mountain is one written 60 years ago by Robert Frank Coolac.
And we'll come back to that in a subsequent in a subsequent lecture.
But just to show you the kind of the importance of mountain,
I'm showing you a person this this is a famous and quite controversial picture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
It's not of main or feature very much. Again, you the New Zealand season book.
That's what you see, right? It's a painting on Silk Road.
That is what it looks like or fits by. Sell in this case as it all falls back on the paper.
And that paper backing is renewed at subsequent periods through history many times.
So actually, this is the pictorial surface. This is all that survives.
This is what it looks like in the conservation studio when it's removed from its from its paperback.
And it's you know, it's not in great shape. It's supposed to be a thousand years old.
So, you know, it's maybe a reason for not being in great shape.
But these physical aspects of mounting and framing and so on are things that we won't have a great deal of time to talk about.
But that will feature in these lectures a little bit. Now, there's a problem with the hand scroll, which is that it doesn't fit on the page, right?
It doesn't fit on the page and it doesn't fit on the on the screen.
And I'm showing you here. Here. So what normally tends to happen in books and lectures like this is that you get details.
This is a detail of a hand school. It's not a it's not a picture.
So if you like a detail taken over the picture. And what I'm showing you here or are these are these are single objects.
All right. So this is is not for pages is one picture that goes one, two, three, four.
But you can imagine that if you were to photograph it like that and and and put it all on one slide,
what you would see would be a thin line about that size.
You know, absolutely nothing would would be visible and that would be true in a book as well.
Now, of course, it's very inconvenient. Of people in the media industry did not take into consideration the needs of
our history professors in the 21st century is extremely thoughtless of them.
They should have they should have paid more attention to what I want. But it's an issue that I think is a genuine issue,
that if you feel like it's easier for the for the the the the literature to deal with images like works of art like this,
which which fit entirely into the screen or that one, then it is to deal with things where, you know what, you can't get the whole thing on the page.
You can't get the whole thing on the screen. So that's another, if you like, formal aspect that we kind of need to think about.
So the hanging scroll, the can scroll. These are, if you like, two of the key formats of paintings in the mean period.
But that by no means the only format, the only one that was, if you like,
a novelty of the main period is is fan painting or more precisely, falling fan painting.
And it's a novelty, the main period,
because a folding fan was itself a novelty that made you rethink of the folding fan as kind of quintessentially part of Chinese culture.
But it's developed outside China, probably in Japan, possibly in Korea.
There is still a certain amount of debate and an argument about that,
but they are certainly novelties in China and do appear there before about the 15th century.
And just incidentally, that's an, I think, an interesting reminder about what you might call Ming China's porosity and openness to the outside world.
Some of the older historical literature about the Ming Dynasty written during the Cold War and very much under the influence of a Cold War mentality.
This image of the Ming Dynasty kicking the Mongols out of China and pull the
shutters down and they don't want anything to do with the with the outside world.
This is a fantasy. And if you like, the fact that something we know think of is quintessentially Chinese, the Fooldom fan.
Come into use in China from elsewhere in Asia, in this field and in Egypt immediately,
almost immediately taken off as another surface form, which painting can be carried out?
Now, obviously, you will immediately trade.
This is blown up very much bigger than it is in reality.
In reality, it's going to be about that size folding this folding van.
And then we might want to think about the kind of presence and absence it's carried on the body.
It's there. It's not there.
So immediately we're starting to think about kind of viewing and context of viewing and who's viewing, who's viewing where this van is.
It's obvious that it's missing. This wooden sticks that would actually make it into a fan at some point in its history.
The paper sheet,
the folding paper sheet that forms the body of the fan has been taken off its wooden stick with no bamboo sticks and mounted into into a book.
And it therefore relates to another format of main painting, which we call the album.
And the album Leaf is, as the name suggests, a small painting which is going to be bound into it, into a book format.
So, again, something like this in reality is going to be very, very, very much smaller than it looks.
In fact, these two pictures are the same size. In reality, the use of this size.
And they both come from an album of paintings by the artist Jim Game.
This one, called Examining Antiquities, is a painting of people looking at a painting in the context that you yourself will be looking at the paint.
So it's it's an album leaf. It would have been mounted in a book.
What it shows is, gentlemen, looking at paintings and a book is any sort of kidney shaped things here.
These are going to be fine paintings of an all of our kind.
That is not a folding file,
but as sort of circular found had a steak on it that had been in use for a giant indigenous life for some kind of hundreds of years.
Just know that, again, this is a social event. It's another one of our pictures of people looking at pictures.
But it's a social event. It's it's gentlemen kind of getting together.
So hanging scroll hands, scroll fan fan, closely related to album leaf.
All of these formats of painting that I've talked about up to now are mobile, are extremely mobile.
And you can you can see here sort of servants springing up with others.
He a little boy here. He's got over his shoulder a bundle of hanging scorpions.
That is when they've finished looking at the album Leaves.
They're going to look at the hanging skulls, but they may these may be things that have been brought.
Perhaps somebody has come. One of these gentlemen has come to visit another.
He's brought three highlights of his collection for them to enjoy together.
Pictures are extremely mobile, or rather, some pictures are extremely mobile.
And those formats which I've discussed up to now, which are extremely mobile, are the ones that survive best.
There are other formats of painting in the main. And one of those is, if you like, the screen painting.
Let me come back to my set of the four gentlemanly accomplishments.
This is painting. And this one's calligraphy.
You'll notice that as well as the painting that he's looking at, though, is the hind in in both of these cases.
How large would be free?
A large standing's screen. A large wooden frame.
And within this frame, there is a painting in this in this case, a landscape painting of trees in the distance.
This is a scene I don't know how well it shows up from where you're sitting.
I think we should move all of these chairs ten feet this way for survivors of these lectures.
This is a sea of waves. It shows kind of Tocumwal turbulent waves.
Now, not we have plenty of evidence from the big period that these kinds of screens may appear in pictures all the time.
We actually do have wooden lifesaver.
Not more than one or two might be three of these.
Would you surviving frames? Well, we don't have a single surviving painting in a frame in a screen frame like this from the big picture.
Not one. Not one zero zero. I.
So that's one of my cases where the stuff we know existed.
It doesn't mean that we've got very little of it. None of it. Absolutely none of it.
We do have certain pictures which form their from their proportions.
The proportions of these more a European, if you like, land what we call last on your computer would be called Lancey format.
We have some pictures that tell that scale and size and which we think might probably once have been screening panels,
but they're all now mounted as any scrolls.
There's no there's no surviving one like this.
And then the same is true on what you might call the most sort of what had once been one of the most such a century.
So there's a hanging stool and there's the screen painting for comparison. And then there's the issue of all paint.
Now, if we go back into Chinese history and read texts from the eight, nine, 10, eleven century,
it's quite clear that some of the most prestigious and important artists of those early periods,
some of the most important things they did were wall paintings, which might be in palaces.
I was at the imperial family palaces of the rich, but also in temples.
And in the main period, people still thought that some of these pictures survived.
That is, people describe seeing things or walls that they thought were by important early artists of the past.
We also know that in a couple of contexts, significant artists of the main period were involved in war painting, but none of that survives at all.
None of that survives. While I'm showing you the chancellor is the shrine of the Jena TAIONE in Shanxi Province.
And I'm here while outside the Jong-Nam Urban Artist Corps.
This is a very important early building. It's an 11th century building.
It's one of the most important surviving pieces of 11th century wood architecture in China.
And in the early 16th century, we know that it was decorated on the outside.
You see really these these panels are these panels here.
So basically, you come up to the front of the building, which would have been, I think, eye popping,
a colourful themselves when they were when they were first painted in the early 16th century book, which I know extremely faded.
But I show you this just to say that, you know, there is painting on walls in the Ming period.
It's all done. All of it which survives is religious, right.
There's no secular wall paintings surviving from the main period.
The only surviving war painting is is in Coneheads religious buildings, all of it done by anonymous craftsmen, artisan painters.
It's all in good science terms to a no juat picture another painting.
And it's all rather lower class, although will kind of investigate that as we go.
Now, I suppose one thing I'd just like to kind of take on board at the beginning and forgive me if this seems kind of patronising,
but when I've taught courses about Ming painting before,
one of the kind of unspoken fears that people sometimes have,
which I think it's part of get out on the table at the beginning, is isn't it all going to look the same?
Is that all going to look the same? There's going to be a man and some trees and a little white guy and, you know.
What do you what do you do with it?
Well, I could kind of say, well, there are an awful lot of Madonnas in European art that's never that's never stopped anybody,
anybody from talking about them.
But I hope to demonstrate that while there are certain just as there are certain recurrent themes in European painting that come back again and again,
there are certain recurrent themes in Chinese painting, most principally landscape, which comes back again and again.
But I hope I can demonstrate that there is a range of other things going on.
And I don't think you would need to have taken a lot of art history to see that this picture doesn't look very like this picture.
You know, here we have something which is highly coloured, which is figuring out which is finger painting and interesting.
And I just know we'll see this picture again. It's actually a real picture of somebody making a painting, a painting this.
His poor portrait will come from. We'll come back to that. It doesn't look it doesn't look at all like this.
One of the things that I think is striking about the Ming and also, you know, as I said,
we've got a wider range of evidence is that we have a great range, if you like, of different kinds of makers of painting.
So, for example, we've got pictures by emperors.
We've got pictures by an early 15th century emperor. We don't have any Europeans.
We don't have any photos of the first Charles 5th Henry.
Henry, your faith is kind of contemporary of this guy. They're not famous far for the production of painting.
But Ming Emperors, or at least some of them, were significant artists in their own right.
We've got work by by courtesan's, by professional female entertainers.
We've got work by female members of the elite, female members of the of the upper classes.
We've got work by religious professionals, monks, both Daoist and Buddhist monks.
We've got work by what loosely we might call professional artists.
And I just draw the attention, the fact that these these two works,
both by professional artists, by professional artists, is a term that covers a very wide span.
This guy we know the name of the biography we do.
We have dates. We kind of have a sense of this is, if you like, completely anonymous work produced again in a context of religious devotion.
So a time like professional painter carries a whole very, very wide span.
And we'll be picking apart as we go on some of exactly what. What does that mean?
We have paintings by high members of the imperial bureaucracy who are also wealthy landowners.
And we have paintings by wealthy landowners who were not successful members of the imperial bureaucracy,
but hence had but still had considerable social and economic and cultural status within within the period.
One of the things I hope to convince you over these eight weeks is that maybe painting doesn't all look the same.
This, if you like,
highly detail that rendering of the urban scene in which you can zoom in and look at the kinds of goods being sold on the streets of a great city
is not the same kind of painting as this painting of this landscape AIDS and not of a specific place very much linked to the practise of poetry,
very much kind of working together with the texts written on it.
These just aren't the same kinds of paintings from.
Here's a. A difficult looking chart.
And I don't want to.
I just want to kind of finish by this really the message I want to take away from this is just like painting was done by lots of people.
Painting played lots of different roles in the main period. It's not one kind of thing.
This is a chart by the anthropologist,
the Alfred Jail from his book or an agency in which he tries to make a sort of system of thinking about what pictures do.
And he deals in four times the artist, which is kind of easy with the that the index, which is his technical term.
Why? For the work of art. Right. So the painting is the index of the bus for the time being.
The thing over there in the world to which the painting relates, broadly speaking, the subject matter and recipient the viewer.
I just want to kind of whiz through three examples to show you, you know, that maybe this is a kind of helpful.
Or at least it gives us a way of thinking about the variety. Here's a picture we looked at for Sharon Jones.
Hold on a moment. Very important artist, very highly regarded in this day.
But I think one of the things that's happening in this painting is what you might call what's happening in this clops.
Material inherently dictates to artists the form it assumes.
Now, this is what you might call the modernist idea of truth to materials.
Plus, it should look like plastic chairs you're sitting on. Should look like plastic chairs.
No facsimiles of of wooden chairs. The importance of ink.
One of the things is that this this foregrounds the fact this is a deliberately, extremely monochrome monochrome picture.
And it's very much about telling you that this is in on a surface. This is this is in on itself.
It's it's not. It's not. It's not.
It's definitely not. See, law class painting.
It's not a depiction of some specific event. It's that it speeds up.
But it's it's as much about ink, the material as it is about the point of a mountain.
So that's one aspect. One of gals sort of possibilities.
Here's a quote from the very early morning right at Waterloo who claimed great sacred mountain
man PLI in northern China and unproduced to see these paintings are my paintings at home.
And once someone by chance saw them, he thought they were contrary to all painting styles.
I'm surprised I asked, who's your master? That's the kind of thing you would ask somebody to make it.
Who taught you this? Where did you get this from? Who was your master?
I replied, I take my heart, mind. And that's another sort of arched translation of the Chinese time scene.
But in China, the kind of there's there's not a separation that you get in Cartesian for between a seat of the rational functions and the emotion.
In early modern Europe, the kind of emotions are here and the rational bit is here.
But the Chinese understand exactly what the Chinese understand.
What do you do to make that decision? That distinction, which is why people often use this translation.
So I take my heart mine to be my teacher. So I learn from kind of what's in me.
It takes its master, my eyes, which in turn reveal amongst PLA as their teacher.
So in a sense, you've got this. What made the painting the mountain toward the eyes.
The eyes to the heart. Mind. The heart. Mind. Talk a hand produced.
So in a sense, the painting made its pick made that the man made the painting.
A prototype as cause of index. Is that the man who causes the picture?
The escort agency is in some sort of way. No one knew was a doctor.
And just to kind of that, he'd he brought on medicine as well to veer into the medical for a moment here to woodblock.
Pictures definitely to Moha from a May 15th century edition of attempts to Orthodox essentials of eating and drinking,
orthodox essentials of eating and drinking, the text that originally been written back in the 14th century.
We understand. But this, if you like, gives us an insight into into what painting can do, which is very different from.
What you might call or history or or or any notion is that it's.
Because this is the painting as a therapeutic object.
And just to put it very briefly, and some of you may well be aware of Chinese understandings of the body at this period.
There are a whole set of five phases, but they're also about the balance in the body between yin and yang,
between the kind of cool with principle of yin and the hot, dry principle of yang.
And one of the things which this book, which is about, it's about food and medicine, because, again,
Ming Chinese doesn't make a distinction between the categories, food and medicine,
stuff and stuff you take in that keeps you in balance, that keeps your health.
Well, one of the things you can do to keep it healthy is if you've got too much gain in your body,
you can look at a painting or something that's got a lot of yang.
All right. And that's what's happening here. These people are not kind of engaging in some sort of aesthetic experience.
They are rebalancing the yin and yang in their body by looking at paintings.
And there's the paintings are actually doing stuff to them.
And that's what Gale would have called in-depth source of power over a recipient to sit in.
The spectator submits like the paintings and doing things that actually doing things to the to the people in here.
This lady is looking at. She's looking at this as a Phoenix bird here.
And then this is her shrimps and praise the Lord.
So you kind of things, lobsters and crayfish and so on, which are going to be very young because they where they live in the margins.
And therefore, she's balancing the the effects of her body.
And she's balancing the the principles of yin and yang in her body.
Now we can see this. They might say, well, this is very kind of this is very different from what one might think about.
But I've just I just think it's probably unwise for art historians to kind of completely forget about this rule of painting as well.
We noticed that one of the paintings that she's looking at here is painting of animals so that the animals kind of there's only hunting.
I think this is this is a hunting scene, but it makes one think that is that is that sort of sense of a painting is doing something to the viewer
is not completely absent when one looks at a wider range of paintings that the people looked at.
I think it would be very unwise of the art historian. I would say this is not known to do with us.
This is something completely different. I think we want to think take seriously the notion of painting and culture in the mainstream.
We're going to have to take the widest possible framework for understanding how paintings were made,
how paintings were viewed and what painting or people thought paintings were for.
And that's what I'm aiming to do for the next seven weeks.
So thank you very much for your attention today.