Page 9 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

to the tradition. However, as an artist whose fundamental training was pictorial rather than

calligraphic, the roots of his art lay naturally in the Song tradition of painterly illusionism and
effects. Even his most 'literati' works establish a convincing atmosphere and push the
brushwork in the direction of performance, two aspects of the career painter's craft. Unlike Li
Zai, he had no success at court, but made his mark in Nanjing, before returning to his native
Hangzhou for the last eighteen years of his life. The range of his painting corresponds to the

panoramic, but weighted, survey his oeuvre offers of the society of his time. Dai came into
his own during the post-Xuande period of economic depression, and the world he depicted is
a sober one: we see farmers, fishermen, women feeding chickens, poor and tired scholars,

lone and harried servants, officials in retirement, strong-minded recluses, and men committed
to their religion (482). Few artists had portrayed the cares of men more sympathetically, but
rarely do we see the life of the wealthy, or even a rich man's garden.
The fearful aspects of life in a pre-modern society could also become subjects of
painting, even the painting of court artists. It was in this period that the Water and Land

Assembly ritual to greet the souls of the dead became a particularly important part of
Buddhist temple practice. The ritual required a vast ensemble of paintings exposing the entire
pantheon of Buddhist deities, all the way down to the terrifying nature spirits which drew

upon the non-Buddhist substratum of animist beliefs, and finally graphic descriptions of the
eight sorts of unhappy deaths (482). A complete set of paintings of the Water and Land
Assembly, presented to Baoning Temple in Shanxi by the court in 1460, was preserved in the
temple itself until very recently. Their hierarchically differentiated realism is a survival from
Jin and Yuan religious painting, when a close connection had already existed between

religious sites in Shanxi and the court in Beijing. It finds a counterpart in sculpture, from this
period onwards, in equally exhaustive and realistic sets of lohans, sometimes several hundred
in number.

CHINA AND THE WORLD. The Yongle and Xuande courts were particularly
sensitive to the geographical symbolism of empire. This found major expression in a second
and equally important direction taken by Buddhist art, which was imperially sponsored on a
vast scale in this period. During the Yuan dynasty, Lamaist monks from Tibet and Nepal had
enjoyed favored status at court, and Lamaist rites had been used to support Mongol rulership.

The Yongle emperor maintained these close connections, no doubt partly due to the need to
maintain good relations with Tibet in the face of a still dangerous Mongol empire. Among
the notable artistic results were: a new printing with illustrations of the Buddhist canon, the

Tripitaka; the construction of the Temple of Five Pagodas to the north-west of Beijing, still
standing today; the casting during both reigns of large numbers of small gilt bronze icons as
gifts to Lamaist leaders (484); and the manufacture of ceramics with Sanskrit or Tibetan