Page 114 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

1 20 The story of ihe filial Shun. Detail
of an engraved slone slab from a
panoramas illustrating the descriptive fu and other, shorter
sarcophagus Late Northern Wei
Dynasty, about 520-5J0. poems; landscapes depicting famous mountains and gardens;
there were scenes of city, village, and tribal life, fantastic Taoist
landscapes and pictures of the figures symbolising the constella-
tions, illustrations of historical events, legends such as the story of
Hsi Wang Mu. Most must have had landscape settings, while sev-
eral were pure landscapes, and at least three paintings of bamboo
are recorded. The great majority were presumably either standing
screens or long handscrolls.
We can obtain some notion of the style of the time from the
paintings that line the walls of tombs in North Korea, notably the
"Tomb of the Dancing Figures" and the "Tomb of the Wrestling
Scene" (Fig. 117) at T'ung-kou on the Yalu River. Although
painted as late as the sixth century, these lively scenes of feasting
and hunting amid mountains are in the tradition of the Han tomb
paintings at Liao-yang. But to see the most advanced treatment of
landscape in this indigenous style, we must look not at the provin-
cial tomb decorations but at the engraved slabs from North
China, of which the most beautiful examples are the sides of a
stone coffin adorned with incidents in the lives of six famous filial
sons of antiquity. The figures seem hardly more than the excuse
for magnificent landscape panoramas, so richly conceived and so
beautifully drawn that they must surely have been copied from a
handscroll—or, as Sickman suggests, a wall painting—by an ac-
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