Chinese Perception of European Perspective: A Jesuit Case in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Preface: A Cross-Cultural ConcernThe late-Ming master of literati Dong Qichang (1555.1636) commented on the relationship between nature and painting, as quoted and translated by James Cahill: 'From the standpoint of splendid scenery, painting cannot equal [real] landscape. But from the standpoint of the sheer marvels of brush and ink, [real] landscape is not at all the equal of painting.'1 This early-seventeenth-century remark about Chinese landscape painting demonstrates the mutually irreplaceable status of nature and painting as reflected in contemporary artistic discourse. However, in the European Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti (1404.72) and Leonardo da Vinci (1452.1519) claimed that painting not only derives from nature but can also imitate it, through science. Speaking of composition in painting, for example, Alberti states in his treatise that, as for the movements of the body, the painter 'must take from Nature with great skill'. Painters must work 'with the greatest diligence from Nature and always directly imitated, preferring those in painting which leave more for the mind to discover than is actually apparent to the eye'. In Alberti's De Pictura (1435), this first treatise on linear perspective for painting, the author claims at the outset that he wants 'to explain the art of painting from the basic principles of nature'.2The above comparison between the two different methods of painting does not exclude the possibility that Dong thought of painting in the sense of its being able to imitate nature. However, the intermediary role that science played between art and nature in the Renaissance was not evident in China. Perspective is a scientific theory derived from the ancients and a 'geometric-optical way of picture making'.3 It was revived and formulated in Renaissance art as a special pictorial construction of 'linear perspective'. In its tradition in classical antiquity, it derived from the application of geometrical laws to analyze human vision. As Leonardo states, perspective is a science originating from arithmetic and geometry, devoted to all the functions of the human eye.4 Art and science were perceived to be interlinked in European intellectual circles, a perception that lasted into the seventeenth century.5 'Nothing can be found in nature that is not part of science': this statement by Leonardo clearly expresses the foundation for the interlinking of art and science.6 So, Leonardo continued to explain painting in terms of scientific thinking as follows: 'No human investigation may claim to be a true science if it has not passed through mathematical demonstrations.'7 Dong's writings, on the other hand, teach one to 'observe' nature carefully, but not in the sense of imitation and scientific analysis. Dong's 'considering heaven and earth [the natural realm] as teacher ... urges painters to attempt to catch the spirit of nature and accommodate that into painting.8 This can be seen as an axiom of traditional Chinese pictorial theories, so that the solely physical imitation of nature was never appreciated in their traditions. Although the following statement of Samuel Edgerton is not necessarily correct in content, it illustrates that the intellectual discourse shared by art and science in Europe is not to be found in China. It is, therefore, an important premise on which to contextualize the transmission of European perspective to this country:In fact, by Western standards, it is hard to comprehend how Chinese science and technology was [sic] able to progress at all with so little involvement of artists or pictures.9Martin Kemp proposes, instead, a complex of reciprocity between works of art and scientific concepts from the Renaissance era onward, instead of an a priori or an a posteriori relationship.10From the Quattrocento onward, Renaissance perspective indicated not only technological invention for artistic spatial construction. …