Читать книгу Imperial Illusions - Kristina Kleutghen - Страница 47

between them, suggests a vast distance. Although the architecture, figures, and landscapes in Rules for Reciting the Rosary are not generally sinicized, the pictorial conventions in the illustrations are consistently Chinese: neither shading nor cast shadows suggest mass or volume; figures do not diminish in size with distance from the viewer; and space does not recede horizontally, as with linear perspective, but rather vertically up the picture plane in isometric perspective. Relying on a Chinese model for spatial recession, therefore, the Ni Zan–style landscape in this first image is an elegant pictorial compromise to suggest deep space with an image that would have been immediately familiar to the literati the Jesuits sought to convert. The entire scene therefore demonstrates that Christianity was entirely commensurate with literati lifestyle and culture.

Using a different approach, Aleni’s Illustrated Explanation typically incorporates shading, size changes, and horizontal recession, together with a variation on the “image-above-text- below” (shangtu xiawen) format and the presentation of multiple narrative moments in a single image that were common in late imperial Chinese woodblock-printed fiction.⁵⁰ How the Illustrated Explanation integrates these period printing conventions together with single-point perspective is seen in “Washing the Feet of the Disciples at the Last Supper” (figure 1.5). The haloed Christ appears three times in this continuous narrative, which proceeds from left to right in the European mode of reading, rather than from right to left, as was common in Chinese books and horizontal scroll paintings. The key elements of these three moments are ordered using Chinese characters, and differentiated by setting each moment in a different architectural space on a different scale. The smallest section of the image, at the top left, shows the meal itself with the disciples seated around the radiant Christ; Christ then leads his disciples into the room at the bottom left in the extreme foreground; and in the largest section of the image he remonstrates with Peter over his reluctance to allow Christ to wash his feet. The figures diminish dramatically in size with their distance from the viewer, and although shading in this image is subtly limited to architecture and furniture, other illustrations in the book show even more modeling through shading (although not on any of the figures themselves) as well as cast shadows.

The tiled floor on which Christ kneels offers the viewer visual entry into the image at the eponymous moment in the narrative. The orthogonals of the tiles recede horizontally away from the viewer to terminate behind the seated disciples at an incongruous folding screen with a landscape painting in isometric perspective, surrounded by more traditional ink plum and bamboo. The landscape on the screen initially seems to extend the space of the room, as a window onto a background landscape might, and repeats the Annunciation illustration’s use of an identifiably Chinese landscape painting to create this effect. But with its abrupt application of isometric perspective in the space where a vanishing point should be, the folding landscape screen is a blunt insertion of a Chinese pictorial convention within the otherwise predominantly European representational treatment. One can only speculate why the artist chose to include a Chinese-style landscape and painting format in just this particular space and scene. Perhaps it was because the narrative occurs