Northern
Sung Dynasty (960-1127)
Style:
Northern Sung painters had a more majestic vision. They attempted to comprehend the physical world intuitively. Their transformation of visual impression into the superb coherence of form reveals their conviction of coherence and order underlying surface appearances in nature, the same conviction that inspired Sung philosophers to erect the vast and orderly structure of the Neo-Confucian cosmology.
The artists approached nature as if for the first time, and responded to it with wonder and awe. The freshness of their vision and the depth of their understanding were never to be quite recaptured.
Another theory of painting held by scholar-artists reflected their Confucian background. The quality of a painting, said the literati writers, reflects the personal quality of the artist; its expressive content derives from his mind, and has no necessary relationship to anything the artist or the viewer thinks or feels about the object represented. The value of the picture does not depend upon its likeness to anything in nature.
The Chan school, another theory of painting in the thirteenth century was centered in monasteries located in the hills around Hang-chou. The Chan artist conveys a stronger sense of swiftness and vigor, working chiefly in simple washes and broad, scratchy strokes made with a straw brush. The painting is not only moving in purely ink-on-paper terms, but also functions as an image ¡V abbreviated, impressionistic, but nonetheless compelling ¡V of the external world.
The second half of the Northern
Sung period, from the mid-eleventh century into the early twelfth, was an
especially eventful age in Chinese painting. There were many separate schools
and masters: traditionalists and innovators, archaists and eccentrics,
academicians and amateurs, working in a bewildering variety of styles.
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Artists:
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