THE CHINESE AND THE JESUITS

From The Mustard Seed Manual of Painting.  1679.

Eastern artists, such as the ancient Chinese, did not accept the linear perspective.  The Jesuit missionaries found that when the Chinese were shown images with the typical Western representations, they deemed them absolutely devoid of any artistry.  And of course, when the Jesuits were shown the accepted Chinese images with a basic parallel projection method, as shown in the above image, they deemed these works as sterile and without any life.  It is also of interest to this study that the Chinese artists used watercolors for a ephemeral effect.

The Chinese also did not use any shade or shadows in their images.  They could not understand the Western use of shadows, or why anyone would even think about using them in their drawings.  In fact, when they saw shadows on Western drawings and paintings, they interpreted them as crude dark blotches.

So the Jesuits lumped Western representational methods into their teachings of other Western inventions, including water pumps, astronomy, etc.  The strategy was to use all of these Western cultural artifacts to try to bring the Chinese around to their Christian way of thinking.  And as we might suspect, this basic strategic plan did not go over all that well.  Thus, one metric of the Jesuits evangelical success was whether they could get the Chinese to adopt the linear perspective.  And this was basically futile;  while the Chinese saw the general beauty of the Western images, they did not see any improvement from what they had been doing for hundreds of years.  In fact, even the Chinese that converted to Christianity continued to use their traditional cultural drawing methods.

Something as simple as a graphic technique becomes embedded deeply into a culture.  The way we think impacts how we see. And how we draw impacts how we see.  These linkages form a deep cultural bond which typically is not broken, especially as we have seen when the Jesuits tried to force this on the Chinese people.

The Taoist mindset won out in the end.  For this states that nature and humanity are not separate.  thus it is silly to make a drawing with one viewpoint.  Sou Che wrote in the early 800s, “He who judges painting according to the concept of resemblance shows the understanding of a child.”

The traditional Chinese painting styles that were so entrenched in their culture was codified in the publication Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting by the Wang brothers in 1679.  This famous book gave incredibly specific rules for painters to follow.  What is of specific interest to us is the manner in which painters were exhorted to show how things work.  So if a road was to be depicted, it had to have a beginning and end.  If a spring was to be painted, it needed to have a source.  These sorts of instructions serve to establish a more holistic universe surrounding the painting.  And as should be clear by now, the more holistic the better.

The Jesuits ended their Chinese mission in 1773.  Their success at Christian conversions was on par with their success at Linear Perspective conversions.