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The Concept of Famous Painting in the Tang Dynasty: the Case of Zhang Yanyuan’S Lidai Minghua Ji

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The Concept of Famous Painting in the Tang Dynasty: the Case of Zhang Yanyuan’S Lidai Minghua Ji Culture and Dialogue 6 (2018) 191-222 brill.com/cad The Concept of Famous Painting in the Tang Dynasty: The Case of Zhang Yanyuan’s Lidai minghua ji Ning Xiaomeng Department of Philosophy, Peking University, PR China [email protected] Abstract This essay offers a critical reflection on the central concept of “famous painting” as expounded in Zhang Yanyuan’s Lidai minghua ji (历代名画记, A Record of Famous Paintings of All Dynasties). Building upon the past scholarship, this essay will proceed in the following three steps. I propose to distinguish the concept of “famous painting” from the common understanding of painting. I argue that it is the former that plays a central role in the entire text of the Lidai minghua ji. As a result of this new approach, I will outline an intentional and discernable structure formed by the fifteen essays in the first three books. I proceed with discussing the relationship between famous paint- ings and famous painters so as to demonstrate Zhang Yanyuan’s implicit intention and considerations in selecting and evaluating painters and their works. Finally, I examine the basic formats of famous painting and further elucidate the historical dimension embedded within the concept of famous painting that constituted and changed the very idea under consideration. Keywords famous painting – famous painter – scroll – screen – huazhang – mural © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/24683949-12340047Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:21:07PM via free access 192 Ning 1 Introduction1 Among all the written works in the history about Chinese painting, Zhang Yanyuan’s (张彦远) Lidai minghua ji (历代名画记, A Record of Famous Paintings of All Dynasties) is regarded as a reference.2 Although it was neither the first record in history of the lives and works of famous painters, nor the first evalu- ation of painters and their works according to clearly defined and systematic criteria, the Lidai minghua ji provided the basic ideas and format for historical writing on Chinese painting, setting a quasi-inescapable paradigm for subse- quent works in the field. The Lidai minghua ji consists of ten books, with the first three books describ- ing briefly the significance, historical development, and basic factors of paint- ing, and the seven succeeding ones containing the biographies of painters in all dynasties up to the author’s own time. This compilation structure has been highly valued by those who have studied it. For example, Yu Shaosong (余绍 宋, 1883-1949) argued that this work was written after the manner of standard histories. He regarded the first part (Books 1 to 3) as playing the role of shu 书 or zhi 志 (historical records), whilst the second part (Books 4 to 10) as analogous to the style and form of collective biographies (列传). Thus, the relationship 1 This essay is a revised version of a text that was originally published in Chinese as “Minghua de guannian ji qi meixue yiyi: yi Lidai minghua ji wei hexin” (名画”的观念及其美学意 义——以《历代名画记》为核心), Wenyi yanjiu (文艺研究), No. 9 (2016): 28-38. 2 Zhang Yanyuan (张彦远), Lidai minghua ji (历代名画记) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin mei- shu chubanshe, 2011). The full text in English has been translated and annotated by William Reynolds Beal Acker as A Record of the Famous Painters of all the Dynasties, with the first three books in Some T’ang and Pre-T’ang Texts on Chinese Painting, vol.1 (Leiden. E.J. Brill, 1954), and the remaining seven in Some T’ang and Pre-T’ang Texts on Chinese Painting, vol.2 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1974). Some paragraphs of this work have also been translated in Early Chinese Texts on Painting, compiled and edited by Susan Bush and Hsio-yen Shih (Cambridge/ London: Harvard University Press, 1985) and the translation of some sentences and terms have been discussed by Erik Zürcher in “Recent Studies on Chinese Painting: Review Article”, T’oung Pao, Second Series, Vol.51, Livr. 4/5 (1964): 377-422. This paper will take Acker’s translation as the main reference with slight modifications in some places, while references are also made to the other two works. In order to avoid the confusion for the English readership, the transla- tion of the title of the Lidai minghua ji will be amended to A Record of the Famous paintings of all the Dynasties, which somehow maintains the original form of Acker’s translation, while by replacing the term “painters” with “paintings”, it tries to keep the translation accordant with the original text literally. Furthermore, similar amendments will also be made to the translations of some relative works, such as Tangchao minghua lu (唐朝名画录, Records of the Famous Paintings in the Tang Dynasty), Yizhou minghua lu (益州名画录, Records of the Famous Paintings at Yizhou), Shengchao minghua ping (圣朝名画评, Comments on the Famous Paintings of the Present Dynasty), and Wudai minghua buyi (五代名画补遗, A Supplement to the Famous Paintings of the Five Dynasties). Culture and DialogueDownloaded from 6 (2018)Brill.com09/28/2021 191-222 02:21:07PM via free access The Concept of Famous Painting in the Tang Dynasty 193 between the first three books and the latter ones is similar to that between the records and biographies in the standard histories. It is precisely this character- istic that makes Yu Shaosong lauded that the author was “writing a history of painting without being confined to work simply on biographies, this is where the author’s outstanding insight and knowledge are shown.”3 He therefore con- sidered the Lidai minghua ji to be the work that played the most important role in the history of Chinese painting, just as the role that Shiji (史记 The Grand Scribe’s Records) played in Chinese historiography. In this sense, the Lidai min- ghua ji is not merely a record of the works and lives of painters, but should be considered as an exemplar for writing the history of Chinese painting. For this, Yu even called it the “progenitor” of the written history of Chinese painting, and “the best work ever in the history of (Chinese) painting.”4 Zong Baihua (宗白华, 1897-1986), the famous esthetician, also highly ac- claimed this work. For him, “although the title of Zhang Yanyuan’s work seems to be in the form of history, the work itself provides us with systematic consid- erations and discussions of the essence of painting.”5 He also noticed the dif- ferences between the first three books and the rest, and considered the fifteen essays in the first part as monographic treatises on different topics concerning painting, whereas the second part as purely historical records. He compared this work to Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, which is also composed of two parts, the first part being a study on the essence of art, while the second part a history of art in the narrow sense. Both “have systematic con- siderations first, and are followed by detailed historical records.”6 What Zong Baihua highlights here is the systematizing tendency shown in the structure. For him, the treatises in the first part are not merely what Yu Shaosong de- scribed as “those that are not suitable to be included in the biographies.”7 As an esthetician, he was drawn more to the theoretical concerns of painting. He found in the fifteen essays in the first part an implicit intention to set up a system of art criticism. Following this consideration, Zong Baihua tried to lead the readers to see Zhang Yanyuan’s confidence in evaluating and classifying painters,8 and summarized Zhang’s contributions to the methodology of criti- cism into four aspects, and they are “setting up criteria,” “maintaining logical 3 Yu Shaosong (余绍宋), Shuhua shulu jieti (书画书录解题) (Hangzhou: Xiling yinshe chu- banshe, 2012), 6-8. 4 Ibid., 6. 5 Zong Baihua (宗白华), “Zhang Yanyuan ji qi ‘Lidai minghua ji’ ” (张彦远及其《历代名画 记》), Xueshu yuekan (学术月刊), vol. 1, (1994): 6. 6 Ibid. 7 Yu Shaosong, Shuhua shulu jieti, 6. 8 Ibid., 5. Culture and Dialogue 6 (2018) 191-222 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:21:07PM via free access 194 Ning consistency in principle,” “analyzing painters’ works in light of their different brush-stroke styles,” and “differentiating works according to the styles and the periods [to which they belong].”9 It should be noted here that Zong Baihua’s view is strongly colored by the Kantian aesthetics, which pays more attention to the judgment of taste and to the exemplary meaning of the great artists. It is from this point of view that Zong Baihua tried to reveal Zhang Yanyuan’s at- tempt in building a theory of judgment of taste and art criticism in this work, which had not received enough attention before. To frame it in the convention- al terms of Chinese painting, we may conclude that Zong Baihua emphasizes on the aspect of pin (品, appreciation and classification) of the Lidai minghua ji, rather than treating it merely as a history. A similar point had been made by Ruan Pu (阮璞, 1918-2000), a famous art historian. He agreed with Yu Shaosong in comparing the structure of the Lidai minghua ji to the record-biography format in the standard histories. Moreover, he pointed out that this work had both the characteristics of pindi (品第, eval- uation-classification) and zhulu (著录, records).10 As he put it, … no matter with respect to the whole structure of the work, or to Zhang Yanyuan’s own purport in forming up the conception, this work com- bines together the characteristics of history, evaluation-classification, and records. It should not be simply placed in the category of historical works, as modern bibliographers have done.
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