The Hangzhou Portraits of Confucius and Seventy-two Disciples (Sheng xian tu): Art in the Service of Politics

Abstract

Erected at Hangzhou by the first Southern Song emperor (of China) in 1156, this monument served imperial patronage of the cult of Confucius, by which Chinese emperors from the second century onward gained the allegiance of the educated elite. The original context of the tablets was destroyed and the surviving evidence of their polemical purpose was deliberately expunged by an early fifteenth-century official, who then attributed the images to a great artist active in a very different context. This article discusses the repositioning and attempts to reconstruct the original ideological program and artistic affiliations of the tablets.

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Julia K. Murray

Julia K. Murray has held curatorial positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Freer Gallery of Art, and Harvard University Art Museums, and she installed the Asian art galleries of Harvard's Sackler Museum. She has written articles and catalogues on East Asian art and is the author of the book, Ma Hezhi and the Illustrations of the Book of Odes, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming [University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis. 53706].