Pictorial Art and the Attitude toward Nature in Ancient China

Abstract

IT has been said by practically every writer on Chinese art that landscape painting was a comparatively late development in her history. Indeed, it seems to have made its appearance even later in China than in the West; there is nothing in the art of the Later Han period, for example, that can compare either in technique or in pictorial sophistication with the contemporary Roman wall paintings from Pompeii, such as those now in the Muzeo Nazionale, Naples, and in the Vatican Library, which reveal a high degree of artistic maturity.¹ And yet, as we know, the art of landscape painting not only reached the greatest heights in China in later centuries, but also has come rightly to be looked upon as a uniquely Chinese achievement, in which some of the pro-foundest concepts of her civilization were most perfectly expressed. Are we to believe that this peculiarly Chinese art sprang into existence of itself in the first centuries of the Christian era, or alternatively—for there are almost no traces of the art in the Late Chou period—that its appearance was due to the importation of foreign ideas in the Han Dynasty? The latter hypothesis has been examined by the present author in another place,² and the view put forward that it is not necessary to look beyond China's own frontiers for more than a very restricted group of landscape conventions that make their appearance in certain types of Han decorative art. The purpose of the present study is to look somewhat deeper into the thought and art of pre-Han China to see whether it is possible to trace further back into Chinese history the sources of certain of the attitudes, beliefs, and pictorial techniques which became the foundation for a later landscape art.