Emperors of past dynasties

Author: Shanghai Fine Arts Publishing House
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2003-12-01
Features: Appreciating and learning Chinese painting cannot be separated from understanding the classic masterpieces in the history of painting. The history of Chinese painting is long and profound. Due to various reasons, the number of ancient paintings that have survived to this day is not only extremely rare but also scattered across the world. For this reason, we have compiled this series of "Treasures Online," reclassifying the masterpieces of Chinese painting history according to elements such as subject matter, style, and technique, gathering them together, printing them with meticulous care, and enlarging them as much as possible to their original size, providing learners with a first-class model of the original works. Additionally, we have provided detailed introductions and analyses of each masterpiece included in the book, narrating the stories behind these treasures that have been passed down through the centuries, and inserting photographs and materials of related masterpieces, offering readers who love Chinese art rich resources for appreciation and reference.
Emperors of past dynasties have been an important theme in the history of Chinese figure painting. In ancient times, without photographs, the appearances of the great emperors were preserved solely through paintings. The earliest portraits of emperors can be traced back to distant and unverified textual records, such as the "Observation of the Ming Tang" in the Analects of Confucius, which records Confucius visiting the Ming Tang of the Zhou Dynasty and seeing portraits of the virtuous emperors Yao and Shun and the tyrannical rulers Xia Jie and Shang Zhou on the walls around. He believed that these emperor portraits "each depicted the states of virtue and vice, serving as admonitions for rise and fall." Confucius's evaluation succinctly revealed the function of ancient emperor portraits: they were used for the purpose of moral education. When Confucius regarded "the admonitions of rise and fall" as the fundamental task of painting art, he perhaps did not expect that such a thought would dominate the creative function of Chinese figure painting for a long period, and even the heroic portraits of leaders that were popular after the founding of the People's Republic of China were, in essence, variations of this idea.
Zhang Yanyuan of the Tang Dynasty, in his Records of Famous Paintings of Past Dynasties, quoted a similar view to that of Cao Zhi from the Three Kingdoms period, similar to Confucius: "When viewers see the Three Emperors and Five Kings, they cannot help but look up in awe; when they see the tyrannical rulers of the Three Seasons, they cannot help but feel sorrow. This shows that the mirror for reflection and warning lies in painting." Early emperor portraits were mostly in the form of screen paintings or murals, using the visual contrast of "virtue and vice" to achieve the purpose of "promoting education and aiding ethics," as the saying goes, "seeing virtue is enough to warn against vice, and seeing vice is enough to inspire virtue." After the Han Dynasty, emperor portraits in court murals and scroll paintings became political works that subtly advised rulers. Not only did officials use them to promote their views, but emperors also used them to beautify themselves, demonstrating their ability to accept historical lessons and their role as wise rulers who chose virtue over vice. However, as the buildings with numerous murals were destroyed, later generations could only imagine the style of these works through textual records.