Page 139 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

Fig. 11. Buddha Amitabha and Buddha Maitreya. Dated
wondrously as a magician. So I suggest ranking
him at the top with Gu and Lu (preface to
vol. 7, Lidai minghua ji).
Li and Zhang are both certainly unstinting' 3 in
their praise of Sengyou, but for a specific
description of Zhang's style we have only Li's
remark about his marvelous sense of bones. What
should we make of this phrase? After the previous
passage, the Lidai minghua ji goes on to quote
Zhang Huaiguan:
In the subtleties of drawing people, Zhang gets
the flesh right.
This is most crucial. Elsewhere, the Lidai minghua ji
is even more explicit:
In drawing the bones of people, Zhang falls
behind Gu and Lu. Zhang gets the flesh right
(vol. 6).
In contrast to the styles of the great masters who
preceded Sengyou, the main point about Sengyou's
"marvelous sense of bones" is his shift in emphasis
from spirit and bones to "getting the flesh right,"
that is, the shift from slender to ample. Hence, the
terms used in temple inscriptions of the time to
describe the Buddha's image included "a relaxed
moon face" 1 ' and "a face like a full moon." 1
'
round faces are very different from the narrow faces
so highly regarded before. Early signs of this change
from the slender style, and of the gradual
emergence of the fuller-bodied figures that "tret the
ORIGINS AND TRENDS IN THE DEPICTION OF HUMAN FIGURES
to 483. Rock carvings. Mao county, Sichuan Province.
flesh right," can be seen in the two stone carvings
of Amitabha and Maitreya Buddha from Mao
county, Sichuan Province, dating from 483 (fig. 11).
Fuller and rounder figures can also be seen clearly
in the stone carvings from the Wanfo Temple in
Chengdu, which date from 523 (cat. 150), 529, 537,
and 548, all bearing inscriptions from the Wuji
period of the Liang dynasty. (The above are all in
the collection of the Sichuan Provincial Museum.)
These same traits are also evident in the carved
images of female attendants from the painted brick
tomb of the late Southern dynasties period in Qijia
village of Changzhou,Jiangsu Province. '6 And as
the bodies grew fleshier, the garments became
simpler.
By about the second quarter of the sixth century
the new Southern style represented by Zhang
Sengyou had probably diffused all the way north to
Luoyang, the new capital of the Northern Wei,
which was again turning avidly to southern China
for models in conduct and in art. According to the
"Biography of the monk Fazhen":
The monk Fazhen . . . was well wised in the
Chengshilun, and had a profound grasp ot its
meaning. His lectures were brilliant and
original, and he was peerless between tlu-Yi
and 1 110 rivers. His tame was as great as that o\
the monk Jian. At the time the virtues of the
Wei were in decline, women were in the
ascendant, predictions of doom were
increasingly common, suspicions were rampant.
—envy was excessive this is whal the world was
These
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