Page 88 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

no ground, no hint of any setting, and yet we seem to be looking
down from above on an open plain across which they dash with
tremendous speed. This painting shows that the lateral movement
from right to left, and the sense of a space that seems to extend far
beyond the picture area, both characteristic of later scroll paint-
ing, were already mastered by painters before the end of the Han
Dynasty.
Landscape, however, must have played a very subordinate part
in the great fresco cycles that decorated the palaces and ancestral
halls. The themes were most often Confucian, as illustrated by a
passage from the Han shu (History of the Han Dynasty): "The
89 Shooting birds on a lake shore, and
harvesting. Moulded pottery tile From mother of Jih Ti in teaching her sons had very high standards: the
Kuang-han, Szechwan. Han. Emperor Wu Ti] heard of it and was pleased. When she fell ill and
[
died, he ordered her portrait to be painted on [the walls of] the
Kan-ch'iian Palace. . . . Every time Jih Ti saw the portrait he did
obeisance to it and wept before he passed on." Other passages in
the Han shu bear witness to the Taoist predilections of the Han em-
perors. Wu Ti, for example, had a tower in the Kan-chuan Palace
where were depicted "the demons and deities of Heaven, Earth,
and the Supreme Unity. Sacrificial utensils were set out, by which
the divine beings were to be addressed."
Didactic too, if in a more human and amusing way, are the fig-
ures painted on a celebrated series of tiles from the gable of a
tomb-shrine now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. One scene-
depicts an animal combat; another may represent, as Sickman has
suggested, an incident in the life of the virtuous Princess Chiang,
of the ninth century B.C., who took off herjewels and demanded
to be incarcerated in thejail for court ladies as a protest against the
emperor's dissipation—a threat which soon brought him to his
senses. The figures, drawn in long sweeping lines with a sensitive,
v:j Guests arriving for the funeral feast.
Detail of a wall painting. From a tomb pliant brush, stand and move with wonderful ease and grace; the
in Liao-yang. northeastern China. men discuss the affair in dignified agitation while the women, el-
Eastern Han Dynasty.

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