Life-Motion and the Sense of Space in Early Chinese Representational Art

Abstract

STYLISTIC evolution is nowhere more clearly and fully demonstrated than by the change in Chinese representational art between Han and T'ang. The contrast of extremes is comparable to the difference that separates Greek art of the archaic period from Hellenistic maturity. Monumental sculpture, on the one hand, is represented in the horse of Ho Ch'ü-ping's tomb1 by a block of Daedalan immobility and stoniness. On the other it shows a mastery of living, moving forms no less complete than Lysippus': an almost Alexandrian grace and soft sensuousness in the Bodhisattvas of T'ien-lung-shan, a wild strength no less dramatic than the Pergamene in the guardian gods of the Nara temples. Han painting, again, as imitated in the Shantung tomb slabs, is an art of silhouettes, strung along a base line without any concern for environment, or enclosed conventionally in an architectural frame drawn in elevation. T'ang representation, in contrast, has learned not only how to give the illusion of swelling mass by line alone, but has achieved a complimentary control of space as well. The grand Paradises of Tun-huang, with their great numbers of figures and their sumptuous settings of palaces, terraces, and pools, are set out in plane behind plane and unified by a centralized perspective as effectively as a neo-classic opera staged by Schinkel.

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