Page 16 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

objects in ostensibly literati taste, produced by a wide range of regional artisans largely

centered in the south-east, started to find a national market. In short, the sixteenth century
saw the private values associated with the literati win out over public ones, as cultural
initiative passed out of the hands of the state and was taken over by the entrepreneurial
culture that had first emerged in the late fifteenth century.
The Art of the Court. The Jiajing reign is notorious for the emperor's neglect of court

affairs in favor of a private obsession with Daoism. Encouraged by those around him who
hoped to fill the power vacuum he was creating, Jiajing gave himself over to public Daoist
ceremonies and the private practices of the adept. Court art was diverted toward the creation

of a magically auspicious environment, in which the earlier symbolism of cosmological order
was replaced by the imagery of talismans, omens and deities. These are best known from the
blue and white ceramics of the period, which display an intense blue and a highly glossy
glaze that made them the last Ming ceramics to be widely admired in later times (496). On
one level, the Daoist art of the Jiajing court was almost populist in character, its iconography

overlapping with that of urban popular culture. Cizhou wine jars of this period, for example,
similarly depict cranes, immortals and the trigrams, albeit in a rougher style (497). The
emperor would have approved, too, of the fact that this jar of 1540 was made "on an

auspicious day", as its inscription states. The rough, "inspired" style characteristic of much
Zhe School painting had also long linked court art to the popular tradition represented here
by Cizhou decoration. In this period, the Daoist works of Zheng Wenlin, better known as
"Crazy Immortal Zheng", seem to represent a conscious rejection of sophistication. However,
as seen in ceramic decoration the Daoist art of the court was highly ordered, and it is on this

level that one can see a certain compatibility with the 1530 reworking of the Altar of Heaven,
which turned it into a site dense with mystic symbolism (498). The decisive change was the
addition of a third element to the south of the initial two, which became the new focus of the

site. Known as the Circular Mound, it took the form of three concentric terraces within a
further circular wall, itself within a square wall (498). The number of terraces, posts and
flagstones, and the diameter of each terrace: all had numerological symbolism derived from
the great tertiary of Heaven, Earth and Man. Distances and proportions were chosen in order
to allow different parts of the altar to come into alignment when seen from specific, ritually

important, points.
The short Longqing reign was marked by a reaction against Daoism, but under Wanli
the religion was restored at court alongside Buddhism and all manner of popular beliefs. A

court fashion for the elaborate observance of festivals led to the production of embroidered
festival badges, which eunuchs, officials and palace women alike were required to wear at
the appropriate moments of the year. The fundamental continuity with the earlier Jiajing