January 31

We continued our discussion of "Introduction" to The Chinese Painter as Poet.

This chapter compares European and Chinese views on the relationship between poetry and painting, and then examines a variety of Chinese sources that discuss this relationship.

Europe

Simonides of Ceos (Greek, c. 556-468 BCE), "Painting is mute poetry, and poetry is a speaking picture."
Horace (Roman, 65 BCE-8 BCE), "as in painting, so in poetry" (ut pictura poesis).

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), the German playwright and poet, in Laocoön, rejects the "sister arts" theory, "In poetry it has engendered a mania for description and in painting a mania for allegory, by attempting to make the former a speaking picture, without actually knowing what it could and ought to paint, and the latter a silent poem, without having considered to what degree it is able to express ideas without denying its true function."

The name Laocoön refers to a story in Greek mythology; Laocoön angered Poseidon by trying to warn the Trojans about the Greeks' gift-horse, sending sea serpents to strangle him and his sons. A picture of the famous Hellenistic sculpture depicting the climactic moment of this story is here (scroll down to the bottom of the page). Lessing's treatise discusses this sculpture. He argues that painting and poetry have different functions: painting can only depict the events of a single moment; poetry can depict movement over time.

British poet Matthew Arnold (1822-188) expressed Lessing's views in a poem "Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoön."

China

The "sister arts" theory also developed in China. Su Shi (1037-1101, a.k.a. Su Dongpo) also compared poetry and painting, saying that the poetry of Du Fu was "formless painting" and the painting of Han Gan was "unspeaking poetry." Also, the fact that narrative handscroll painting was an important form of Chinese painting might seem to forestall the development of theories about the antagonism between the two arts. However, the situation was rather more complex than that.

Wang Maolin (1640-1688): Poems are superior to paintings; paintings cannot convey the same level of detail that poems can.

Zhang Dai (1597?-1686): "If one does paintings on the basis of painting possessing poetic verses, his painting cannot be good; while if one writes poetry on the basis of verse having a pictorial idea, his poetry will inevitably be unskillful," i.e. arguing that poetry shouldn't try to do the same thing that pictures do.

The beginning of ideas about the connection between poetry and painting date from very early times, however.

A New Account of Tales of the World (Shishuo xinyu) compiled by Liu Yiqing (403-444) talks about it in two places:

Dai Kui: Fan Xuan begins to understand the value of painting after Dai Kui paints pictures illustrating a poem.

Gu Kaizhi: This painter tried to translate poetry into painted image, but was frustrated by his inability to depict the idea of "escorting the homing goose," emphasizing painting's limitations.

Yu Xin: his poems "are the rist to describe paintings without referring to their models in nature" (Cynthia Chennault), writing poems in praise of paintings of scenery.

The first "poet-painter" was Wang Wei (698-761). Though none of his paintings survive, glowing descriptions of them do, as do numerous poems.

The connection between poetry and painting continued to deepen, and it became common practice to combine poems and paintings, and for poets to paint and vice versa.

Readings for the next class

We will take a look at Chapters 1 and 2 of Japanese Art.

Does the "Introduction" have a thesis, and if so what is it?

In Chapter 2, do any the objects look like those of any other artistic tradition? To put it another way, how are they similar, how are they different, and how do you account for this?