Leonardo Unveiled by Chinese Writers: The Reception of Renaissance Art in Twentieth-Century China

Abstract

The reception in mid-twentieth-century China of the Italian Renaissance in general, and of Leonardo da Vinci in particular, is the subject of this article, focusing on two figures: Fu Lei and Liang Sicheng. After travels in Europe in the 1920s, Fu Lei returned to China and delivered a series of twenty lectures in 1934, which were well received at the time but were only published in 1985 as Twenty Lectures on World Masterpieces of Fine Art. The title is deceptive, as the lectures focused exclusively on European art. Addressing the paintings of Leonardo and Botticelli, Fu Lei sought to find equivalents in the Chinese language of the emotions ascribed to the viewer of Leonardo’s paintings, such as Mona Lisa and the Last Supper. Chen Liu notes a marked ekphrastic element in Fu Lei’s work, which sought for musical analogy and employed the manner of Chinese literary criticism called shi-hua to bring the reader closer to the spirit of the art work. Nearly twenty years later in 1952, Liang Sicheng published an article on Leonardo in the context of a conference on world geniuses. Writing as an architect, Liang Sicheng’s Leonardo is very different from that of Fu Lei, and stresses the engineering interests of the Renaissance polymath and his scientific research as a model for the future development of planned socialism in China.