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Landscape Painting & Northern
Song
After the fall of the Tang Dynasty
in 906, China once again descended
into a long period of social
anarchy. Yet it was this time of
social and political turmoil that
witnessed one of the supreme
artistic expressions of Chinese
civilization.
Toward the end of the Tang Dynasty,
in the late ninth and early tenth
century, scholars retreated to the
mountains, living in hermitages or
in Buddhist temples. In their
seclusion, they discovered in nature
that moral order they had found
missing in the human world, and as
an expression of their newfound
faith, they turned to the depiction
of monumental landscape, a symbolic,
cosmic vision of man's harmonious
existence in a vast but orderly
universe.
During the Northern Song Dynasty
(960 - 1127), the spirit of the
recluse painters was absorbed by the
professional court painters and
projected into a heroic vision of a
timeless, archetypal landscape.
Monumental landscape painting
flourished for more than one hundred
years from the late tenth through
the early twelfth century.
Referred to as the painting of
mountains and waters (Shan - Shui
Hua), landscape motifs of trees,
mountains, and water first appeared
in ancient Chinese art as background
elements in figural representations.
After the breakup of the Han empire,
during the fourth and fifth
centuries, the influence of Taoism
and Buddhism led poets and painters
to turn to landscape for spiritual
solace. The narrative pictures of
cities and of scholars' gardens,
which developed during the Tang
Dynasty, were part illustrated map
and part genre painting. These early
landscapes were illustrative and
narrowly focused; they did not
approach the monumentality and
transcendence achieved by the early
Northern Song painters, who, with
their vision and the conviction of
their belief, created a landscape of
truth; landscape of emotion;
landscape of realism.
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students.itec.sfsu.edu
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