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OK, well, good morning. And let me start this lecture on painting in China in the introduction to the history of art.

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See you. So the introduction looks at a whole kind of broad range of contexts.

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And obviously, this is a very large context.

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In a way, it's completely insane to attempt to talk about, you know, a several thousand year tradition in 50 minutes.

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So obviously, I'm not here to kind of cover the whole field. What I want to do is to sort of situate this material for you.

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And talk a little bit about kind of how art history has dealt or might deal with this very large, but this very, very large and this very large topic.

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I'm going to throw a lot of images on the screen kind of very rapidly.

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Obviously, the thing goes up on loan afterwards. But in a way, it's not not the names and dates and so on that are important.

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I want to try and get hold of a few big ideas.

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And I want to start with a sort of what's a deliberately provocative idea, which is that this painting,

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I would argue, is the right shape for art history, whereas this painting is the wrong shape for art history.

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Now, what I mean by that is that the mechanisms that art history has,

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the technical mechanisms that we have for showing and looking at the images work quite well with things that are specific shape,

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like a European painting from the 17th century. And they don't work so well with some of the things that are of this shape.

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So here is here's the whole of this painting. Here's a detail from it.

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Junction's beggars and street characters. 16TH century Chinese painting.

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But if if I show you the whole of it, you know, it becomes a tiny little strip within the within the slide.

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And it's very, very hard. It's very hard to look at.

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What you might think and I talked about this in the very first lecture in this

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series about the relationship between the tools that we've got and my tools.

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I mean, both kind of physical tools like projectors in classrooms.

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The relationship between the tools that we've got,

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the physical and also intellectual tools and the kinds of material that we're trying to grapple with.

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I know I said to one of the big questions is RSX tools, which were designed for this maybe.

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Are they going to work for this or do we need a completely different a completely different set of tools?

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Now, of course, there are other tools that have developed.

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I've talked in the first lecture about slides and the history of slides and where slides come from.

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One of our slides are not the only the only tools we've got.

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And I've I've just put a link to this University of Chicago Web site,

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which is an attempt to use the modern technology of digital images to deal with particular formats of Chinese painting.

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And because obviously one of the things that you can do on a screen is squalled.

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These things are called schools. Schooling is something that we all do all the time.

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We kind of scroll up and down and we scroll from side to side.

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So maybe there are new technologies for the technology of the computer that enables us to look at that.

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So this is an attempt to kind of. Sure. Chinese paintings in a different way and in particular to capture some of the temporality.

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That is the fact that, you know, things might be looked at over a period of time.

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Another another example. But I would recommend to you, if you're interested, on the on the Web.

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James Cahill now retired from the University of Berkeley, where he was for many years.

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Very distinguished professor pastorate. Chinese art has kind of put down on well, not done put down on paper, but put down on video,

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a series of eleven hour long lectures about the early history of Chinese painting.

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That seems to have changed, beating only about as far as thirteen hundred.

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Right. Leaving out the last kind of seven, eight hundred years is what I'm mostly gonna go to talk about.

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And you know, I'm not suggesting that anybody should sit down and watch eleven hours of Jim Cahill lecturing on video,

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although if you want to know this stuff, this stuff is there,

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but it might be worth having just having a look at them to see the ways in which because they they're actually apart from anything else.

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A very good you. Of the technology of kind of moving cameras and zooming in and out of details and so on.

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In a way which is much harder for me to do here in the kind of in the formats that I thought.

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And if I had time, I would show you some bits of the of the actual use of bits of this of this site and untrue.

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Some bits of Cahill. But in order to say what I want to say within an hour, I'm not going to do that.

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But have a look at this. If if you're interested. So this question of kind of right shape, wrong shape is just a frame.

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The issue of, you know, what are the tools that we're using for physical and intellectual?

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Now, if I'm going to talk about painting, I'm going.

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I'm talking about, you know, a category which is perfectly meaningful within Chinese culture itself.

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And I'm going to talk later in this lecture about the distinction between image concepts and Eatock concepts,

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concepts within in concepts without culture.

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But let me start by saying that, you know, painting and the Chinese word is quar as a carrot for the Chinese word for, you know,

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this is this is a a category idea, a discourse, a topic of study kind of within Chinese culture and has been so for a very long time now.

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It's often linked with other concepts and in particular in China in the past or even in Chinese language

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in the present where you will often see together are two concepts put together in the term Shu Juat,

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which usually get translated in English, is painting and calligraphy painting.

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The painting was I'm going to talk about and calligraphy being the art of writing with

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the brush and that kind of aesthetic social and cultural discourses around writing.

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One of the interesting things to note is I think though is a little this is usually translated in English, almost always translated.

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English is painting is lengthy. The Chinese puts it the other way around.

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The Chinese always as well. Which means calligraphy and painting.

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And that represents an idea that calligraphy is, if you like, the senior cultural practise earlier and more important and indeed more highly valued.

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Well, I'm talking about painting today.

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It's worth bearing in mind that calligraphy, the art of writing is, you know, is seen as the more prestigious and the more important.

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It's always expressed in this in this order. And you get that in parts of other compounds, too.

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What I'm going to talk later on in this lecture about a fine distinction made at

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various points in China between the category of pictures and the category of painting.

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Those are not exactly seen as the same thing.

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Now, in order to get some kind of a handle on it, I'm not going to talk about everything.

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I'm not going to talk about all periods. I'm going to focus in on this period, the period of China's May dynasty from thirteen.

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Sixty. Sixteen. Forty four. That is if you think about European history or English history.

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We're dealing with a chunk of time from the Black Death to the English Civil War.

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So what we're dealing with, that kind of what's often in Europe, what European historians would call part of the early modern period.

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And it's one of the kind of interesting distinctions about, you know, our terms like that applicable to China at all.

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I'll give you at the end some kind of further reading about this period.

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But I just wanted to draw your attention to, you know, the kind of information that's on various Web sites.

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So, for example, the Oxford Art Online Web site will have, you know, quite good material on, you know, I mean, anything.

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You're going to get a big entry. And you can also look up the kind of names of individual artists on a Web site.

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I'm very fond of is the Heilbrunn timeline of our history, which is valuable for all kinds of things, not just Chinese things.

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On the Web site of the Metropolitan Museum of New York.

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And again, they have some some nice stuff there. So what I want to do is start by talking about the physicality of of Ming painting.

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I want to talk and I want to do that by talking up first about the different formats in which paintings exist.

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What are paintings in this period as material and physical objects?

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And I'm going to talk about them in the order that the formats of Chinese paintings survive.

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Fraud. So these are all formats that existed in the main.

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But I'm going to start with kind of what what would you think of as possibly earlier formats, a move of one of these kind of coexisted in the main.

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The first one to think about is wall painting, the earliest paintings that survived from China in any large quantity.

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Now are wall paintings. They're almost all modified.

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They are all the ones that survive a religious. They are in the context of principally in the context of Buddhist sites.

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And so I'm sure I'm showing a painting that comes from the fifth century. It's on a wall painting.

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It's outside of the wall. The more gold caves in China, in the west of China.

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It's probably changed colour over the years. But we have kind of large quantities of of of this religious wall painting.

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We know from textual sources that they used to be large quantities of secular wall painting as well.

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But that doesn't get that doesn't survive.

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You know, palaces, homes of the rich were decorated.

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The walls were decorated as well. So this is painting on plaster the surface.

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The materials support for this painting is painting and plaster.

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We've got large quantities of these from an early period from much earlier than the Ming.

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But it's but it's both basically all religious.

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Now, if we come into the Ming period itself, we have quite a large quantity of wall paintings surviving.

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And I'm just showing you an example of wall painting that was painted in the early 16th century on a religious site,

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which is a much earlier religious site. This building is 10th, 11th century.

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And you've got this wall painting.

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You can see this is roll painting that is kind of in this sort of entranceway or portico to this very large temple building.

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And so it's sort of half. It's not completely exposed to the elements, but it's sort of largely exposed to the elements.

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And as such, it seems kind of appalling condition and you can hardly see it.

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Which, of course,

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is one of the problems about about wall painting and one of the reasons that it doesn't survive in very large quantities and consequently,

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it kind of doesn't get written about very much.

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You know, if you get a book called, you know, Ming Painting, it won't mention the wall painting at all.

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That's partly because not so much survives,

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all because of what survives is in very poor condition and also partly because what there is is entirely religious painting.

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And this is often viewed as kind of less interesting, less valuable,

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less important than other kinds of painting that I'm going to talk about in a moment that that seemed more kind of important.

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So so there's both kind of practical factors and intellectual factors around why, you know.

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So if somebody said, I'd like to write an essay on Ming Wall painting, I would say can't be done.

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It can't be done because there's not enough writing. There's enough written about it.

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There's quite a lot of material, but it's hardly been written about. It's hardly ever been pulled together systematically.

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But we have to just keep it in mind as a sort of as a sort of background. So that's one former very early format,

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probably existed for a very long time before them in another format of painting that

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exists in the main is the format that we call the hand screw or the horizontal score.

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No, you know, in Chinese, there are different words for different kinds of paintings or as a specific Chinese word for this,

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but it's usually called a hand scrawl in English.

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And here I'll show you an example of a hand scroll painting by I mean, the Nisei artist.

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So this is a 16th century painting called Old Cypress. And as you can see, it's a roll of material.

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This one's painted on paper. There's a roll of material.

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And here it's been unveiled. And I'm very proud of this photograph.

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I got the Kansas City Universal Museum in Kansas City to make this photograph because I

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wanted a photograph or a book that showed that this thing is actually a physical object.

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Usually when they get reproduced in books, only with all we see is that they should be free.

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Now, Chinese paintings don't have frames in the European sense.

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And you thought about freedom as part of as part of our course.

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But, you know, this has a framing to that as it has.

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It has a physicality. And, of course, it has the possibility of extension there.

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Now, this is quite a small hand school in the sense that the pictorial surface of it,

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you know, when it's unrolled, it's about that size and it can be looked at as well.

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But once hand, schools don't tend to be much bigger than that.

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And this picture, you know, gives you some sense of what they like,

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sort of physically the actual origins of the hand scroll are probably in very early forms of Chinese text.

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The very earliest forms of Chinese text before paper had been invented.

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The Chinese that paper they didn't invented until about, you know, time of the Roman Empire, the turn of the Christian era.

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And before that, the four forms of writing were on bamboo strips, which were then kind of banded together to make a rule.

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So you unrolled it and you've got you've got the whole text.

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And this is all of Chinese are at the University of Chicago kind of demonstrating how you're looking at a hand scroll.

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And here's me with a bunch of students looking at one of the hand scrolls in the in the collection of the Boldly and Bodleian Library.

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Now, you can see from the whole human picture that, you know, especially if you look here,

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you know, there's a lot more of it than he's actually looking at. If you go to the Victorian Albert Museum, Chinese painting exhibition,

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which I hope you all will cause fabulous exhibitions once in a lifetime chance to see things of this quality altogether in Britain.

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The you know, you might see a hand scroll kind of completely unrolled, you know,

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and they can be vast lengths in or they can be very, very, very, very long.

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But that's not the way they were looked at in China. They were never completely unrolled.

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So what happens is you you unroll a bit and you look at that and then you're all

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up and then you unroll another bit and you look at that and then your role. Nobody knew that.

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So the thing is, never a pictorial field is looked up completely apart from anything else.

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You couldn't look at them completely in order to see the whole thing. You know,

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you'd have to stand very well back and you'll see in the museum what people

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have to do is kind of walk along the case and look at it sort of day by day.

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So. So he's you know, he's got these hands.

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He's kind of looking at it.

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So when I think about the kinds of audiences for pictures like this now, obviously there's a group of people you're looking at one of these things.

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But, you know, Weltman roars He I actually see it.

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You know, she probably can't see it now. Wow. Yeah.

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This is really what this is designed for. This is quite an intimate format.

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Quite a small number of people are going to look at this at at any one at any one time.

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Doesn't mean that more than one person couldn't. But it's it really, you know, the mechanics of the thing.

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And you either have to hold it in your hands or you have to do what I've done here,

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which is, you know, the thing is unrolled and then a weight is put on it.

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Because, of course, if you want, roll it and let it go. It just goes to you know, it rolls it's it rolls itself up again.

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And schools can be painted either on paper or on cell.

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Those are the two main surfaces. So it's probably the older an earlier surface.

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So the reading of silkworms, because back in China, way, way, way back, you know,

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before into the into the BCE millennia was papers invented around about one hundred, know around about 100 A.D. And they both have.

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No specific material, properties, papers, much more absorbent, no paper will absorb colour, water, colour, more than ink.

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More than more than. Well, those are the two main surfaces.

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But in both cases, the actual painted surface is then backed onto paper so that a hard scrawl is out is physically rather complicated object.

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It's not just, you know, a roll of paper. That's a piece of a long piece of paper that's been painted on and then rolled up.

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It's a piece of paper or in fact, several pieces of paper because of big or sell,

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because a big one may have several sections which are then pasted down on a sort of thicker paper which provides the kind of support for it.

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And when the thing's rolled up, you know, it may well have wrappers and outsides and so on.

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So it hasn't you know, it's quite a complex kind of physical object.

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So that's the that's the Hans school. So we've gone wall painting Hans Gold and I want to go overhanging school.

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The hanging straw is slightly later.

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Format in Chinese history probably came into being in the fifth sixth centuries A.D. and they

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may well have their origins in kind of religious banners that were carried in processions.

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And the hanging scroll or a vertical scroll, as it's sometimes called view is always, you know, more what higher than it is.

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What I wanted the effects of this is that it fits more comfortably onto a screen.

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This is the whole picture. This is is a detail of Hansel.

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And this is a home school which does fit completely onto the screen or indeed onto the page of the book.

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And I think it's arguable that the examples of people choosing books,

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the history for writing about the history of Chinese painting tend to go more towards schools than hand

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stores for the simple mechanical reason that they are more easily fixable onto the onto the page.

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Now, how did people look at the hanging store as its name suggests?

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It hangs and it can be hung on a wall.

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But more importantly, or in fact, in the main period,

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most of the evidence we have for people looking at them in the in the extent of people kind

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of that there are lots of paintings to show people looking at paintings like this one.

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And you can see here that they're not looking at this painting hanging on a wall.

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What's happening is a servant here has a bamboo stick with a small kind of metal fork in it and they're holding the painting up.

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And you'll notice that the man who's looking at it and talking about it,

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I think this gesture suggests that he's making a point about the man in way about having some kind of interaction, some kind of conversation about it.

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You know, that is that he isn't just looking. It's actually holding the thing as well.

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He's actually handling it. So there's an engagement with the thing which is not so different.

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You know, the hand scroll is the one that you've kind of got to hold. You don't have to hold a hanging scroll.

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But the evidence from the period is that people did handle them.

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And and that may well have a lot to do with, you know, if you think about the composition of the thing.

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Right. So let's let's look at this. If I if I you know, if I said,

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where's the middle of the picture and you thought about if you think about drawing a diagonal between those two points, you end up there.

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Right. And it wasn't much happening that, you know, this doesn't seem to be the thing.

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But if you imagine that instead of that, your you're holding the thing, pulling it kind of up close to you,

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then this area where there's a whole lot more visual interest and a whole lot more going on is is what this what you're kind of engaging with.

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So we might think they are about the relationship between the kinds of compositions the artists favoured and the and the contexts of viewing,

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the contexts of looking in the. So that's the.

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So that's, you know, more painting hand scroll hanging score.

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Now another format for painting. I mean, the main theory, but one that doesn't survive as such is the painted screen or the screen panel.

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We've got some Safire. So a number of important pre made painting.

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So this is a this is a 10th or 11th century painting may have originally existed as screen pandan.

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So what do I mean by screen panels? Well, let's look at this painting. Here's a light.

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15TH century painting of an imperial audience. So you've got an empire is long gone.

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And you've got officials kind of standing around talking.

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And you'll see that he's seated in front of this large wooden frame and that set into this large wooden frame.

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There's a landscape painting. See these mountains here? So there's a large painting behind it.

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And this is probably painted on sale on paper, but in one of these wooden frames.

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Now, obviously, this is a much more permanent form of display.

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The hand scroll and the hanging scroll share the characteristic that when you're not looking at them, they're ruled out.

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And actually, they spend most of their lives rolled up because they are all watercolours, you know, and they fade and they're easily damaged.

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So there's no tradition of kind of just banging on the wall and going away.

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All right. The thing even things that are put on the wall are changed and looked at according to seasons and another kind of temporal constraint.

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But these screen panels, obviously, these things are huge and heavy and it's kind of I can't show you an example or rather what I could show you,

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but I haven't got a slide on this one of these wooden frames because some of these wooden frames survived from the 16th century.

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And museums, we've got some examples of that.

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And then we've got very big surviving hand hanging schools, which probably began their life as screen panels, but they don't survive in that format.

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So there's no saying that nowhere in the wall. Is there surviving, being screened with its main painting.

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And if what you've got is the woodwork survives and some paintings survive and this is an example.

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It's a very, very big painting. It's now mounted as a hanging school.

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It's probably it's about one types of probably slightly larger than it's appearing on the screen here.

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It's physically very large. But this was probably once one of those wooden wooden panels.

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So we can't wake up to where we're kind of intuitive.

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So we've got wall paintings and scrolls, hanging stalls, screen panels, and then a format that is conventionally called in in English,

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the Alba Leaf, which is a small painting which was viewed kind of mantid in a book.

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Now, here's a scene of many gentlemen looking at painting and they're looking at now.

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And these are probably 90 paintings. These are probably fine paintings.

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But again, they're kind of you know, they're looking at it sort of they're looking at it together.

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This is a small thing. Yeah.

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This is an album leaf version by the artist Sharon Jewel.

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His drawings from life. So just like some of the things I've been showing you are very much bigger in reality than they appear on the screen.

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This is very much smaller reality. This is about. This is about this size.

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In reality, it's got a you know, it's a very, very small. It's it's a very small thing.

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Here's another one. This cat, you know, comes from the same album, Drones for Light.

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So this is an ERPs. So that's my screen. That's an album leaf.

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This is it. Now, this is itself an album leaf. So this picture of a looking album leaf is itself an album leaf.

255
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It's only that size. That's an album leaf. That's an album leaf.

256
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That's an album.

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So one of the things that that I think that this comparison that and that me is that you can't say certain styles, school with certain formats.

258
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That just doesn't work because, you know, here's it.

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Here's here's a style that is very, you know, very detailed, very meticulous, very highly coloured.

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And it's more or less the same date as this one, which obviously is much more sketchy.

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It's a monochrome ink. It doesn't have any. It doesn't have any of that kind of detail.

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And I have actually going to slide. You know, there's the. There's the two kind of things together.

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So same format, very different style. So what you can't say is certain styles are always, you know, go with certain formats.

264
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There are a range of styles in the main period and almost all of the formats can be used for almost all of the stars.

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The number of variables is quite complicated. And then there's one last format of painting that I want to show you.

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And that's the only format of painting that I'm talking about that was new in the main period.

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So all of these formats exist. In the main period, but they had been developed at different periods in the past.

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But but all developed. The only real novelty is the fine painting in the sense of the folding van painting.

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Now, obviously, this is just the painted surface.

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Again, obviously, this blowed up huge compared to is it has the steps that make it into a folding van.

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Men and women both carried fans in China.

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There are kind of a central part of kind of being being dressed.

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And we might want to think about kind of the viewers for that form, because it's a very small scale.

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It's almost an intimate format. You know, it's something that you carry with you.

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Again, it's something that is not permanently visible because of.

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Know are opened and closed. So it's not there all the time.

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And so we might want to think about, you know, the kinds of audience for that. Obviously, you know, if you let people or w you will see it,

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but it's different from the kinds of concentrated looking where you've got a party of gentlemen looking at things.

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I just want to talk a little bit more about kind of looking at things because here's a here's a set of paintings, again,

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from about fifteen hundred, which show former activities that are particularly associated in the Ming period with with the gentleman.

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These are these are the kind of leisure pursuits that are kind of a gentleman of leisure and elegance and style is supposed to be into.

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These are the four things he's supposed to be into and they are called in Chinese kanji for one, which means Zitter chess, calligraphy, painting.

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So the first one is playing the zither.

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This is a kind of musical instrument called The Chin. That gentleman in particular played Chee.

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The Chinese is waitI, we often call it in English by the Japanese name.

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Gord's is a game of strategy play with lots of black and white characters.

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And here are a group of gentlemen play playing the game and then calligraphy.

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And his gentleman kind of goes blank sheet of paper was it's a brush and he's kind of he's writing on it and then painting.

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Now there's something distinctive about painting here, isn't that if we look at zither, chess and calligraphy,

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what we see is a gentleman doing the activity, playing, playing chess, doing the calligraphy.

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These gentlemen are painting, they're looking at painting, and they're engaged in acts of connoisseurship.

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They're looking at painting.

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And I think significantly, because there's so this is how the thing is kind of conceptualised, that they're looking at painting together.

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This is a social activity. It's not a solitary activity. It's a bunch of gentlemen looking at painting, looking at painting together.

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And we can see a whole range of the form that says there's a blowing up, a kind of detail of it there.

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So we've actually got a range of formats.

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We've got a screen panel behind him, maybe screen panel, which is not previously hanging school that he's looking at.

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And we've got Hans stools, more homes, schools and albums.

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How do I know these are hand schools are not hanging, but when they're rolled up.

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The answer is how many stores have these protruding roller ends, whereas Huntsville's don't.

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Which is how you can tell when a school is not this still rolled up.

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You can tell what kind of a witch of the form it's in.

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So this is a painting of gentlemen looking at painting, which itself shows all the possible or almost all of.

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Exactly. But almost all the possible formats of painting.

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But I think the important point about it is that conceptually, discursively painting this is a picture of the theme of this painting is painting.

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And the way that you paint a painting of painting is not to sure somebody doing it, but to show gentlemen looking at it.

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So conceptually, the act of looking is very important to to the kind of the idea, the whole experience.

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Now, in the time left to me,

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I just want to think about some of the kind of ways or materials that we have for thinking about this kind of wider topic of of what painting is.

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One of the things that we have to take on board is that as well as a very large number of paintings from China's.

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We also have a very large amount of writing from China's past about the theme of painting biographies of artists, theoretical writings.

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There's a huge body of painting, writing about painting.

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And actually we've got writing about painting from earlier and we've got actual painting.

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So some of the kind of most important theoretical writing about painting comes down to us from a period earlier than any painting that we've got.

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So just for example, you know, one of the most important kind of statements about what makes a painting good comes from the writing of this man,

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Sierre, who lives in the 6th century A.D.

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And he says, in order to be good, a painter has to be good at six things.

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And these are the six things which the painter all has to be has to be good at.

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Now, we don't have any paint.

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This is too early for us that we don't have any painting from this early date, with the exception of Buddhist wall painting from from Cave Temple.

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So we kind of don't really know how this related to the painting of the day.

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But what we do know is that in subsequent centuries, this this is a much repeated,

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much discussed, much argued over statement, and it shifts its meaning subtly over the centuries.

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So, for example, YAHA starts by saying, you know, an artist got to be good to all of these six things.

325
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All right. Well, then happens is that people start to say, well, this is a hierarchy, right?

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There are six things. This is the most important one. And this is the least important.

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And then we move to stage where people actually say, well, this is a good thing and this is a bad thing.

328
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What makes painting good is it's kind of capturing of the inner spirit of things and capturing the outer appearance of things.

329
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That's actually a bad thing. Now, he doesn't see this at the beginning, but that.

330
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So what you've got here, rather, has with Europe where, you know, I don't know,

331
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Plato's theory of ideal forms gets chewed over again and again and again and again.

332
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And people kind of change their minds about what it means or use it in different ways.

333
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This kind of theoretical writing. And that's just one example. One has to be aware there is this kind of great.

334
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Or do you feel lots of which is translated into English, by the way.

335
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And it's possible to read now a very large amount of material written by Chinese writers

336
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of the past about the art of painting without ever having to read a word written.

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In Chinese, there's a lot of there's a lot of translation.

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Another thing that people kind of talk about a lot is the relationship between painting and calligraphy.

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That's a big kind of theoretical issue.

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Here's a 14th century writer telling us that writing and painting essentially are different, but have a have a common have a common origin.

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And certainly it's the case that the same material tools are used, the same kinds of brushes are used for both writing and painting.

342
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And of course, many paintings have inscriptions, have inscriptions on them.

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The idea that also about the connexion points in painting.

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There is one basic rule in poetry and painting. Natural genius and originality links together.

345
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Those cultural are those cultural practises. And so you've got paintings that have kind of inscriptions on them.

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Writing paintings also have seals of authorship, which of course are a form of writing which may be put on at the time by the artist,

347
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but may also be put on by subsequent by subsequent owners.

348
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And then, you know, the royalists or the relationship with calligraphy is very close.

349
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And in a world like this, like little, you know, it's kind of hard to say.

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Is this a piece of writing with a picture attached or is it a picture with a piece of writing attached or.

351
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Actually, I think the right answer is that these are this is a thing where the writing and the picture are kind of essentially working together.

352
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And in fact, you can understand what's going on in one, what's going on in one without the other.

353
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Now, I said I would talk about this. I just want to I just want to mention a distinction that I find to help the distinction in thinking about this.

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And this is a distinction drawn from the realm of anthropology as anthropologists invented these terms.

355
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You make an edict pertaining to the view from Imake means, pertaining to the view from within,

356
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developed within the mind of an individual or a culture of meanings developed in terms of native categories.

357
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Not happy about that phrasing. Sam Eaton is describing the view of a culture from the perspective of those.

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Based on cross cultural generalisations, compare with image.

359
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So these these work together. So Emek Ilic explanations are the explanations and the meanings that a culture itself produces.

360
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Right. So, you know, why is this person behaving this way?

361
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You know, they are possessed by an evil spirit. Right.

362
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Might be an image explanation from 50 that possessed by the devil is the kind of thing that people might say in 15th century England today.

363
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We might say this person is mentally unwell. Right. That's an E tip that those are up.

364
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I mean, obviously, we have our Imake explanations. Now, these are not hierarchy.

365
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Neither is better than the other. It's just a good idea to be kind of clear about what it is, what kind of explanations, what ones use it.

366
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So when one says things like, you know, calligraphy and painting are, you know, have a common origin.

367
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That's a kind of impact statement. I use that kind of thing that people themselves said in in the Ming Dynasty.

368
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But Eatock ones are ones that we might use.

369
00:39:42,770 --> 00:39:46,520
We might use none of developed within an individual culture and also be like,

370
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you know, I mean, this modern Chinese people are not mean Chinese people.

371
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So, you know, they might use modern distinctions.

372
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And it's just a helpful way of keeping kind of straight what's in one's mind.

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So I just want to finish by looking at some of the I've shown you a couple of the kind of emek things, you know,

374
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theories that existed within China at the period that I'm talking about,

375
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the issues around the relationship to calligraphy or the relationship to poetry.

376
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But I'd like to finish by talking about some kind of ETEC ways of looking at Chinese painting.

377
00:40:22,230 --> 00:40:29,000
Ah, history has has at its disposal and that I use now.

378
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One of them is what you might call technical art history.

379
00:40:32,540 --> 00:40:38,480
That is. Let's study the thing as far as a material object.

380
00:40:38,480 --> 00:40:49,100
Actually, there hasn't been very much of this. The best book on the Chinese painting as a thing, you know, as a how is it together?

381
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What kind of glue is used? How are pigments made? What kind of pigments do they use?

382
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These kind of, you know, the best book in English books in Chinese, of course, for the best book in English is still Robert Manne,

383
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who led Chinese pictorial authors with Other Kommissar, which was written quite a long time ago now.

384
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This is this picture comes off a website from the National Palace Museum in Taipei and

385
00:41:13,730 --> 00:41:18,490
is a rather good kind of illustration of the different sort of formats of painting.

386
00:41:18,490 --> 00:41:24,560
Really, the only time that technical art history gets applied to Chinese painting,

387
00:41:24,560 --> 00:41:35,510
and this is not completely unique to Chinese painting, is when issues of authenticity are at stake.

388
00:41:35,510 --> 00:41:38,510
So here's a painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,

389
00:41:38,510 --> 00:41:44,870
which they acquired at the beginning of the law at the very, very end of the last century.

390
00:41:44,870 --> 00:41:48,640
And they attributed to an important 10th century artist.

391
00:41:48,640 --> 00:41:58,820
What do you and James K. held? What the man with the 11 hours of lectures on the on the Web said, no, it's a modern free market tomorrow.

392
00:41:58,820 --> 00:42:05,290
So there's a big row about this big kind of you know, there were had to be a whole conference and all kinds of debates and so on.

393
00:42:05,290 --> 00:42:10,430
And I'm one of the things that they did as part of this was kind of investigate the thing physically.

394
00:42:10,430 --> 00:42:15,350
So that's why I'm able to show you this is this is this is a painting on silk.

395
00:42:15,350 --> 00:42:22,460
So this is the actual silk surface, which, as you can see is, you know, it's it is in lots of great shape.

396
00:42:22,460 --> 00:42:28,460
You know, it's there's a lot of holes in it. And so here it is, as you would see it in the mat mounted,

397
00:42:28,460 --> 00:42:37,510
remounted again on paper and with the missing patches kind of touched in in order to, you know, in order to make the thing viewable.

398
00:42:37,510 --> 00:42:42,020
But that's that's the physical surface that actually survives.

399
00:42:42,020 --> 00:42:45,230
But that's. This is a real case, this kind of investigation.

400
00:42:45,230 --> 00:42:49,700
I can show you lots of pictures of what lots of things look like when they're off the mountings.

401
00:42:49,700 --> 00:42:58,610
This is this is a slightly kind of unique thing. Then we might talk about, you know, one of art history is kind of big clubs.

402
00:42:58,610 --> 00:43:02,480
And that's that's the approach through kind of iconography, you know.

403
00:43:02,480 --> 00:43:10,070
What does this picture mean? Well, obviously, kind of iconography is going to be culturally specific.

404
00:43:10,070 --> 00:43:23,150
So, you know, unless you know that this is the images of kind of fish leaping upstream are

405
00:43:23,150 --> 00:43:28,760
images that relate to wishes for success in the imperial examination system.

406
00:43:28,760 --> 00:43:37,350
You became an official, you know, so it's this kind of sense. A huge effort goes like, no, I'm I'm Freeland's, this is like finals, you know.

407
00:43:37,350 --> 00:43:42,890
Huge leap. Talaat and I turn into a drag it or I talk, I turn into an official.

408
00:43:42,890 --> 00:43:46,590
Right. If you don't know that, it's just a picture of a fish. Right.

409
00:43:46,590 --> 00:43:51,750
So iconography always has to be, you know, always has to be kind of culturally specific.

410
00:43:51,750 --> 00:43:55,620
And you know, something like this one which we looked at before. Again,

411
00:43:55,620 --> 00:44:04,350
is probably a specific historical story about the duty of the righteous ruler to listen to criticism from

412
00:44:04,350 --> 00:44:11,760
his officials on the duty of the righteous official to offer criticism to the to the righteous ruler.

413
00:44:11,760 --> 00:44:18,600
So, you know, there's a specific there's a specific kind of iconography going in which you can't walk out if you don't know it.

414
00:44:18,600 --> 00:44:27,270
You know, you can't work these kind of things out. You know, similarly, you know, if you don't know who the bottle you ordered mortal ball is,

415
00:44:27,270 --> 00:44:34,130
you're not going to have a great deal of a handle on on what's going on in a picture in a picture like this.

416
00:44:34,130 --> 00:44:39,930
And I can orthography might not seem obvious, but that doesn't mean that there isn't any.

417
00:44:39,930 --> 00:44:49,680
So if we take something like this kind of very, very famous 11th century Chinese painting, you know it.

418
00:44:49,680 --> 00:44:53,940
What is it? It's a landscape. You know, it's magic. It's early spring.

419
00:44:53,940 --> 00:45:01,820
However, the people of work, particularly on this, argue that these Keer, the kind of composition is iconography,

420
00:45:01,820 --> 00:45:08,820
that these are paintings which were produced in the environment of the imperial court.

421
00:45:08,820 --> 00:45:16,790
And that, if you like and I mean, this is this is the composition of this is very strongly dominated by the central mountain.

422
00:45:16,790 --> 00:45:26,310
It's a very kind of central composition's name. And that that that is related to ideas about the central city of the emperor.

423
00:45:26,310 --> 00:45:31,560
You know, that this is this is a particular kind of imperial core art, which is about,

424
00:45:31,560 --> 00:45:35,190
you know, the ways in which emperors all that are at the middle of things.

425
00:45:35,190 --> 00:45:37,220
So that can be iconography there.

426
00:45:37,220 --> 00:45:47,220
And even when we even probably kind of don't know about pictures, you know, I can show pictures have a range of functions in in China.

427
00:45:47,220 --> 00:45:55,740
And often we need to know the iconography to know about this. They can record things like this occasion when, you know,

428
00:45:55,740 --> 00:46:06,660
cranes are appearing in front of the above the imperial palace or kind of miraculous things appearing in the sky above a Buddhist temple or,

429
00:46:06,660 --> 00:46:16,620
you know, the way the emperors like to have fun. These are all kind of recordings or a particular trip that that this man,

430
00:46:16,620 --> 00:46:28,800
while he made a pilgrimage to a holy mountain or even just scenes of what the what the imperial capital of Beijing, Beijing looks like.

431
00:46:28,800 --> 00:46:46,770
Now, I said I was going to talk about this distinction to what is a common compound made up of two, a picture of PLA, a painting in the 17th century.

432
00:46:46,770 --> 00:46:54,300
This man Ninefold Goodman, CNN said this in ancient times there were pictures, but no paintings.

433
00:46:54,300 --> 00:46:59,070
Pictures depict objects, portrayed people or transcribe events, ask for paintings.

434
00:46:59,070 --> 00:47:02,790
The same isn't necessarily true for them to insist on.

435
00:47:02,790 --> 00:47:09,850
Some specific subject of the representation of some event is very low class.

436
00:47:09,850 --> 00:47:11,310
And what do you mean by that?

437
00:47:11,310 --> 00:47:20,670
And here's the kind of distinction that might have been made in the Ming Dynasty, is that this is a painting, that this is just a picture.

438
00:47:20,670 --> 00:47:24,090
And this is partly about the social status of the artist.

439
00:47:24,090 --> 00:47:30,390
And this is a gentleman, an educated gentleman, an amateur painter, an educated amateur painter.

440
00:47:30,390 --> 00:47:40,780
And this is a this is an artisan, but it's also about the particular kind of style of the things here.

441
00:47:40,780 --> 00:47:44,130
You know, this is about back to go on CNN.

442
00:47:44,130 --> 00:47:52,900
Know one uses a broad brush and execute you as the thing is in a painting, cloudy hills and misty grows beautiful.

443
00:47:52,900 --> 00:47:58,140
This boulders that maybe figures are no figures to insist on some specific subject eye.

444
00:47:58,140 --> 00:48:04,200
This painting is not about a meticulous transcription of what the secret looks like.

445
00:48:04,200 --> 00:48:08,880
This is very invested in the details of what people are wearing or what the streets

446
00:48:08,880 --> 00:48:14,850
look like and all the details of things for sale in there in the city streets.

447
00:48:14,850 --> 00:48:20,660
So in a sense, in 17th century times, this is a painting. But this is just a picture.

448
00:48:20,660 --> 00:48:31,750
And that's a hierarchical distinction between them. So lots of the things that survive nowadays were not thought of as painting at the time.

449
00:48:31,750 --> 00:48:49,990
Here's an anonymous, again, religious painting from the 15th century, or here's the kind of ritual portraits these were used in, in funerary rites.

450
00:48:49,990 --> 00:48:57,820
You know, after people after people are dying. Very meticulous transcription of, you know, her earrings look like.

451
00:48:57,820 --> 00:49:03,130
Hey, Paul. Looks like. And so on. So, again, this is a this is a picture and not a painting.

452
00:49:03,130 --> 00:49:08,940
That doesn't mean that paintings weren't pictures weren't important,

453
00:49:08,940 --> 00:49:21,070
but it means that they had certain specific functions and that they are somewhat lower than the than the category of painting.

454
00:49:21,070 --> 00:49:26,080
Just chalk this one in really to make the point about the category of of.

455
00:49:26,080 --> 00:49:31,840
I mean, again, this is a picture. It's anonymous. It's a picture that's actually made out of writing.

456
00:49:31,840 --> 00:49:36,550
So it's made out of the characters of a religious text.

457
00:49:36,550 --> 00:49:40,840
Well, what these gentlemen are doing is not this is not pictures.

458
00:49:40,840 --> 00:49:49,140
This is this is painting. And that's a category that has a kind of social role as well.

459
00:49:49,140 --> 00:49:54,730
And one of the things that our history is done more recently is Tom.

460
00:49:54,730 --> 00:50:01,850
And this is, again, a broader art, historical thing. But the study of Chinese paintings is part of this broader trend.

461
00:50:01,850 --> 00:50:11,770
There's a peer bit more attention to what we call what you might call a reception that is not quite so much on not think only about what artists do,

462
00:50:11,770 --> 00:50:16,420
but also think about what audiences see and to think about the social construction

463
00:50:16,420 --> 00:50:22,270
of audiences and what kind of person it is looking in what kind of context.

464
00:50:22,270 --> 00:50:28,180
And that directs our attention towards images like this, but also back towards this set.

465
00:50:28,180 --> 00:50:30,460
And think, well, you know what's good, what's going on here.

466
00:50:30,460 --> 00:50:38,960
So there the thing on reception, that's that's a relatively new kind of trend within art history.

467
00:50:38,960 --> 00:50:46,120
And that's a kind of ETEC approach, I think, because, you know, there is not this was the issue that people kind of engage with at the time,

468
00:50:46,120 --> 00:50:50,103
but it's one that seems more productive for all of history today.