Page 223 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

elite, and more and more remote from the experience of the rest of .
society.
This was a great age of art scholarship. Not only the connoisseurs COLOUR PRINTING
and collectors but the painters themselves were students of the tra-
dition, often deriving inspiration less from nature than from the
great works of the old masters which they studied and copied as an
essential part of their artistic activity.
The encyclopaedic knowledge of the styles of the old masters
which amateur painters begin to display at about this time was
aided by the development of colour printing. The earliest colour
printing known in China—indeed, in the world—is a two-colour
frontispiece to a Buddhist sutra scroll, dated 1346. Under the
Ming, erotic books were illustrated in line blocks using up to five
colours. One of the first books to include full-colour printing was
the Ch'eng-shih mo-yuan (Mr. Ch'eng's Miscellany), published in
1606, for which a few of the monochrome illustrations were cop-
ied from prints given to the author by the great Jesuit missionary
Matteo Ricci. The art of colour printing reached its peak in the
243 Pomtgnnaltt Colour woodblock
rare group of anonymous seventeenth-century prints known as
print from the Kaempfer Serin
the Kaempfer Series, after an early collector of them, and in the Seventeenth century.

203