Page 112 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

1 1 8 Attributed to Ku K'ai-chih. The
emperor with OM of Ku concubines.
deparr from this principle, even your bedfellow will distrust
Illustration to The Admonitions of the
Imtruttrrts. Detail of a handscroll Ink you." The fourth scene, now much faded and damaged, illustrates
and colour on silk Possibly a Tang
the virtuous Lady Pan refusing to distract the Han emperor
.
Dynasty copy.
Ch'cng from affairs of state by going out with him in his litter.
The same scene, and almost the same composition, appear on a
painted wooden screen (Fig. 1 19) that was discovered in 1965 in
the tomb of Ssu-ma Chin-lung, a Chinese official who died at Ta-
t'ung in 484. after loyally serving the Northern Wei court, and was
buried in the Wei imperial mausoleum. Other scenes on this pre-
cious panel illustrate virtuous women of antiquity and, at the top,
the emperor Shun meeting his future wives. While it is tempting
to think that the treatment of the Lady Pan scene was inspired by a
version of the Ku K'ai-chih scroll that had found its way to North
China, both may be based on an older traditional rendering of the
theme.
When Liang Yuan Ti abdicated in 555, he deliberately con-
signed to the flames over two hundred thousand books and pic-
tures in his private collection, so it is not surprising that nothing
has survived of the works of the other leading masters of the
Southern Dynasties who were active in Nanking. The Li-tai ming-
hua chi, however, records the titles of a number of paintings of this
period, from which we know what kinds of subjects were popu-
lar. There were the stock Confucian and Buddhist themes, great