Landscape painting
Cards (9)
- Landscape paintingThe dominant form of visual art in China after the 10th century
- Landscape painting
- Included hills, valleys, cliffs, lakes, ponds, rivers, waterfalls, and mountain ranges
- Included plants and animal life with human inhabitants in the background that are almost lost
- Hanging scrollsLandscape paintings that can be displayed on a wall, unrolled from the top and with weights at the bottom
- Hand scrollsLandscape paintings that are rolled from right to left and rerolled from left to right so that the viewer can see a continuous unfolding of the scene
- Album leavesLandscape paintings that are displayed in collections that are bound like a book so that the viewer can see a succession of scenes by turning the folios
- Landscape scenes were also painted on fans, screens, robes, and pottery, but those kinds of media were not usually preferred by literati artists
- Reasons landscape painting was considered an art form
- The literati class was consolidated in the Tang and Sung periods, which meant a shared view of the world acquired through the study of classical literature, a status usually conferred by the examination system, and skills in calligraphy as part of the scholar's training
- Scholars had long experience with Buddhism in mountains and forests, and mountain landscapes were a spiritual home where humans and nature shared affinity with Tao
- Neo-Confucian philosophy inspired a new way of seeing nature, the idea that reality could be understood as the li (principle) of things grasped by "the investigation of things"
- Painting became an agent of such investigation, and each of the various components of Neo-Confucian thought—Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, yin-yang cosmology—had an influence
- From philosophical Taoism came the unity and spontaneity of the world, the oneness of man with nature, which influenced landscape painters to depict plants and animals alive—no dead animals, cut flowers, or plucked fruit so familiar in Western still life