To Say that the development of Chinese painting is still very imperfectly known may sound strange in view of the enormous amount of monuments brought before the public during the last decade in exhibitions, by museums and by private collectors; the many documents concerning the life, works and ideas of artists made accessible; and the many books and articles on the subject.But the work done seldom proceeded beyond the collecting of material; its sifting and critical examination has scarcely begun. It is true that, as a sort of preliminary effect, notions about style in the various epochs have emerged; but they are of the vaguest and haziest nature. Again and again paintings with a striking diversity in style have been presented as works of one and the same artist, and pictures showing the same style have been recorded as belonging to widely separated epochs. It has hardly occurred to anyone that the axiom of art historians in the West, “Not everything is possible at all times” may also be valid for the Far East. This is the more surprising as in the few cases where well-established, dated monuments are abundant—in Chinese sculpture of the sixth century—there is very clear evidence to prove that each generation had its own ideal of form; its own apperception and its means of representation; its own problems and solutions—in a word, its own style. It proves even more: Seen as a whole, the history of Chinese sculpture in the sixth century consists not simply of a haphazard sequence of three or four styles, but of a logical evolution. Even with a break between the mannerisms of the late archaic period, and the period following it, the shift from a visual to a strictly arbitrary apperception of form, was an inevitable issue.