The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (77 page)

In his late years Michelangelo was notoriously tempestuous and difficult to deal with. “Painting and sculpture, labour and good faith,” he wrote friends in 1542, “have been my ruin and I continually go from bad to worse. Better would it have been for me if I had set myself to making matches in my youth. I should not be in such distress of mind.” And he observed at seventy-four, “You will say that I am old and mad, but I answer that there is no better way of keeping sane and free from anxiety than being mad.” He seemed to enjoy his agonizing, as he explained in the lines of his oft-quoted late sonnet:

The
terribilità
of Michelangelo, the terrifying power of the inspired artist, would leave its mark on the future of the arts. The genius of Michelangelo inspired others to make a fetish of genius.

W
E
have seen how narrowly Western art escaped the Iconoclasts’ onslaught on images at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, and so Christianity remained an inspiring resource for centuries of painters. The Chinese experience shows us another might-have-been that would have changed the focus of artists in the West. In China with the great improvement of paper-making in the second century
A.D
. and its widespread use thereafter, calligraphy (using the ancient writing brush and ink) was quickly transformed into an art and married to painting in a union that shaped Chinese painting for centuries. In Europe this marriage never took place, and the quill pen on paper took over from the stylus and reed pen that the ancient Mesopotamians had used on their soft clay tablets. Western painting went the way of the brush, while writing was the way of the pen.

In China the Way of the Brush remained the path for both painting and writing, with crucial consequences for poetry and the graphic arts. While Chinese painters generally had philosophic aspirations far grander than those of artists in the West, their works were less varied in subject matter, color, and materials. Their hopes and their triumphs offered nothing like the Western temptations to novelty, and their legacy is not easy for Western minds to understand.

Chinese painters would be neither craftsmen nor artists in the Western sense. For they would be neither skilled workers hired by the hour to accomplish a specific task nor inspired originals commissioned to produce a unique work. By the eighth and the ninth centuries the way of the brush, the way of calligraphy, had become the scholar’s way, which made painting a pursuit of the educated class, a closer ally of the poet than of the draftsman. After about
A.D
. 1000, when there was a theoretical distinction between scholar-painters and professional painters, many of the greatest painters were professionals. Still the painter’s work remained an exercise of
traditional wisdom, for scholar gentlemen following revered ancients in harmony with the forces of nature. The Chinese thus saw their painters as inspired practitioners of the art of living, which included two artistic skills higher than painting—calligraphy and poetry.

The Taoist current in Chinese thought set man the task of seeking unity with nature and the cosmos, to abdicate the self in harmony with “nonbeing.” Pursuing the
way
, the painter had his task, his subject, and even his materials prescribed for him. Only the man educated in using the brush for writing would be qualified to use the brush for painting. It is not surprising, then, that in China sculpture (which involved physical labor and so was not for gentlemen) was not considered a fine art.

The history of Chinese painting did not produce precocious Giottos or maverick Picassos. Many of the great masters distinguished themselves first as government officials, as scholars or poets, and often were noted calligraphers. And as the arts of calligraphy and painting developed, these arts prescribed the discipline to assure a calm mind, a cultivated memory. All the scholar’s activities were acts of reverence for nature, or as a metaphor for the nobility of man. The rules of ceremony, the Ancient Book of Rites declared, while they “have their origin in heaven, the movement of them reaches to earth. The distribution of them extends to all the business of life.” All acts of community and the individual should be acts of reverence and sacrifice (in the sense of making an offering or obeisance).

While the Sung dynasty (960–1279) saw some of the best of Chinese realistic and representational painting, it also saw the rise of painters in an emphatically Taoist spirit. For them landscape, a literary subject, dominated at first because of the traditional association of the hermit scholar with wild scenery, as well as the symbolism of pine trees, bamboo, rocks, mountains, and running water. The painter was not expected to seek the most beautiful vantage point and remain there to reproduce what he saw in his painting. Instead, he was to paint what he recalled in memory. “The idea precedes the brush” was his motto. “To paint the bamboo,” the Sung scholar, poet and painter Su Shih (Su Tung-p’o, 1036–1101) explained, “one must have it entirely within one. Grasp the brush, look intently [at the paper], then visualize what you are going to paint. Follow your vision quickly, lift your brush and pursue directly that which you see, as a falcon dives on the springing hare—the least slackening and it will escape you.” The Chinese scholar, who from an early age memorized and learned to reproduce the forms of the written characters, had cultivated the “eidetic” faculty, the capacity to reproduce automatically, vividly, and in detail a remembered image.

But, to capture the eidetic memory, and connect the painter to the Tao of nature, the painting had to be spontaneous, and not deliberately done by
stages. The “photographic” memory, the eidetic image, as the psychologist G. W. Allport explains “in distinction to the visual memory-image revives the earlier optical impression when the eyes are closed … with hallucinatory clearness.” Looking inward for a view of the subject to be painted, Chinese artists prepared themselves with a calm readiness of spirit. What the painter drew then would not be a particular bird or pine tree or bamboo, but a composite compounded in the memory. He might have prepared for this, seeking peace of mind and harmony with the rhythms and renewals of nature, by reflective walks in the woods or mountains. He was pursuing Chang Tzu’s goal of “sageliness within and kingliness without” which meant “having achieved the goal of self-cultivation.”

When spiritually prepared, the artist would take his plunge and put his brush to paper. His materials forced him to spontaneity, requiring that he paint quickly in one continuous process. The Western painter applying oil to wood or canvas lived in quite another world. We have seen how Leonardo da Vinci, working on his
Last Supper
, could return when he took the fancy to “take a brush and give a few touches to one of the figures,” or how Michelangelo spent four years on the ceiling and five years on the
Last Judgment
of the Sistine Chapel. The proverbial patience of the Chinese found another expression—awaiting the moment of concentration.

“In painting any view,” the eleventh-century landscapist Kuo Hsi said, “the artist must concentrate his powers to unify the work. Otherwise it will not bear the peculiar imprint of his soul.… If a painter forces himself to work when he feels lazy his productions will be weak and spiritless, without decision.” This moment of decision was crucial, for the painter’s brushstrokes of ink on absorbent paper could not be erased or retouched. The urgency that would speed Monet to capture the visual image of a moment before the light changed, pressed on the Chinese painter too, but for quite other reasons. He had to capture the interior image and could not work in laborious stages.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, this celebrated interior quality, Chinese painting displayed a remarkable continuity over the centuries, in the never-ending pursuit of the Tao. Even as the brush techniques of individual painters changed, their subjects were selected from a conventional list and painted to a formula. The timelessness of Chinese painting, though on a briefer scale, is as striking as that of Egyptian sculpture.

Classic texts had codified the rules of Chinese painting. The most influential of these was the
Six Canons
, by the late-fifth-century artist Hsieh Ho (Southern Ch’i dynasty, 479–501), significantly entitled
Notes on the Classification of Old Paintings
. The
Six Canons
remained a guide for painters and their critics for a millennium and a half. Embodying the ancient Tao of
painting, the canons were designed to perpetuate the Way over the centuries and yet allow some stylistic variance. By prescribing for spontaneity Hsieh Ho embodied the paradox of Chinese painting and defied definitive translation into the jargon of Western art criticism. One translation, by Susan Bush and Hsio-yen Shih, captures Hsieh Ho’s spirit:

The first canon seems to have become the most important because it required the painter to reveal the
ch’i
, the Breath of Heaven (or of Nature), in the work of his brush.

In the Sung dynasty, the arts of painting and of calligraphy flourished together. But their works were not much appreciated in the West and European travelers seldom brought back their paintings. The Sung emperor Hui Tsung (reigned 1100–26), notorious for being a better artist than an emperor, founded the first Chinese academy of painting on the model of the Confucian college. There he himself taught students, set subjects for competition, and judged the works. He built his unexcelled collection of sixty-four hundred paintings by 231 masters, many of them contemporary. One of his own paintings, his celebrated
Pigeon on a Peach Branch
, survives to show us his elegant and meticulous observation of nature. The emperor ended his life as an exile in the Manchurian wilderness. And the Mongol conquest ended the days of glory of Sung art, but not of Chinese painting.

The catalog of Emperor Hui Tsung’s collection showed a range of Taoist and Buddhist subjects, portraits, dragons and fishes, landscapes, animals, flowers and birds, ink bamboo, and vegetables and fruits. The tie of paintings to calligraphy appeared in the “ink bamboo.” The mere outline painting of bamboo was not considered a separate category, but the brushstrokes that painted growing bamboo were thus dignified. For life was to be read in a properly painted “ink bamboo.” Each significant part was to be made with a single brushstroke. Some painters of the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) made a career of painting bamboo. They traveled through China and Annam to see the various species in natural conditions, and studied the old masters of bamboo painting to serve as guides. In the mid-fourteenth century, pictures of bamboo blown by the wind became popular as emblems of resistance to the gale of the Mongol Conquest, and provided the subject for some of the best painters.

But even when the subjects are similar to those of Western paintings, their significance is different. The belief seemed to survive in China that there was only a limited number of appropriate subject matters and that these could be depicted in a certain number of techniques—always toward the Tao in painting. A beautiful statement of the Chinese emphases was the book published in Nanking in 1679, curiously entitled
The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting
, after the home of its publishers. A collaborative work of three brothers based on an album of paintings that had been in their family for generations, it summed up traditions and became the standard handbook for painters. Though intended as a guide for beginners, it had wide influence, went through numerous editions, and attracted attention in the West by its beautifully colored woodcuts.

Just as the
Six Canons
had expressed the aspirations of Chinese painters a thousand years earlier,
The Mustard Seed Garden Manual
now summed up the technical and brushwork elements of Chinese painting in the intervening centuries. Reading it, the Western student of art finds himself in a strange land. To the inexpert Western eye, the Chinese painter seems less an original creator than a performer—like an inspired Western musician playing the composition of great artists before seasoned listeners. Though opening with the exhortation that “the end of all method is to seem to have no method,” the manual proceeds to enumerate and specify. After Hsieh Ho’s six canons, it goes on to list “the six essentials and the six qualities,” followed by “the three faults” (all connected with the handling of the brush), and “the twelve things to avoid.” The uses of the brush are then described, along with the methods for preparing ink and the colors. The sixteen different brushstrokes range from “brushstrokes like entangled hemp fibres” through those “like big ax cuts” or “small ax cuts,” to those like “skull bones” or “like horses’ teeth.” Similarly there is a repertory of dots—from “dotting like small eddies” to “dotting in the form of a plum blossom.” Then follows a Book for each of the nine kinds of subjects, beginning with Trees (the first essential for the landscape painter), through Rocks (all of which have three “faces”), to People and Things, Orchid, Bamboo, Plum, Chrysanthemum, Grasses, Insects and Flowering Plants, Feathers-and-Fur and Flowering Plants. The beginner is cautioned against the “banal,” for “in painting, it is better to be inexperienced (young in
ch’i
) than stupid. It is better to be audacious than commonplace.” And also “be careful to avoid the deadening effects of merely copying the methods of the ancients.”