Imperial Illusions. Kristina Kleutghen
sky, a device common to European but not Chinese painting (and notably not repeated in the scenic illusion), the two men are again dressed in scholars’ robes, and Yongzheng is passing Qianlong a branch of blossoming plum. Although the garden is only barely suggested through a decorative rock, a flowering tree, and tall green bamboo on slightly grassy ground, these few natural elements create mass and volume with subtle shading and highlights in a largely European manner.
Now mounted as a hanging scroll in imperial yellow brocade, this small painting was originally executed in a format that seems to have appeared only in the Qing dynasty.17 “Affixed hangings” (tieluohua, literally “apply-and-remove paintings”) are typically small to medium-sized paintings or calligraphy that are often bound around the edges with a strip of fabric or paper and affixed directly to walls without any attendant mounting. China has a long native tradition of monumental illusionistic murals that share some important similarities with scenic illusions, but scenic illusions are not murals painted directly on walls. Instead, they are a variation on affixed hangings. These significantly larger and heavier versions were produced on multiple pieces of silk joined smoothly together, often with thick backing paper applied for strength and stiffness before being affixed to walls and ceilings. In at least one case, scenic illusions were even mounted on woven bamboo support structures installed onto the surfaces of the walls, perhaps to help minimize the effects of a building’s shifting and settling on the painting, and therefore to maintain the illusion.18
Although the small affixed hanging of Spring’s Peaceful Message did not cover an entire wall in the Hall of Mental Cultivation as the scenic illusion does, and the two works are not known to have been simultaneously mounted in the hall, the smaller affixed hanging painting was originally installed there and inspired the much larger illusionistic work. Today, the scenic illusion of Spring’s Peaceful Message remains in situ on the westernmost wall of the Hall of Mental Cultivation, but what little scholarship it has received has considered it only as a tangent to the small hanging scroll version.19 Yet the two are inseparable, and the introspective poem with which Qianlong inscribed the Spring’s Peaceful Message scroll is also applicable to the scenic illusion:
Portraiture was the specialty of Giuseppe Castiglione,
Who painted me during my younger years.
Entering the room, this white-haired one
Did not recognize who this was.
Inscribed by the emperor in late spring 1782.
This poem has typically been interpreted as a commentary on how Qianlong, grown wrinkled and portly at age seventy-two, after nearly five decades on the throne, barely recognized the slim young prince in the scroll as his former self. However, when read as applying to both the scroll and scenic illusion versions of Spring’s Peaceful Message, the poem, in another negation of phenomenological doubleness, implies two layers of initial misrecognition. Not only had Qianlong aged so much that he did not recognize his younger self in the painting, but the scenic illusion also deceived him into misperceiving the view as real.20 It was extremely uncommon to inscribe a poem on a scenic illusion, not least because of its difficulty but more importantly because an inscription would have destroyed the all-important illusion. Instead, as in this case, related poems were
sometimes inscribed on smaller related works, or else simply recorded as part of the emperor’s writings. Linking scenic illusions to Qianlong’s poetry and the portable paintings that make up the majority of Qing court commissions helps break down the artificial divisions found in most scholarship between portable paintings and wall paintings.21 More importantly, rather than treating scenic illusions as isolated entities, retaining this link engages them as part of the larger body of works alongside which they were originally produced and that often influenced them.
Appealing to Sight and Touch
Standing in front of Spring’s Peaceful Message, Qianlong could not but have appreciated just how much the illusion created a garden where there was only a wall and extended the perceived space of the entire Hall of Mental Cultivation. Walls and bodies are two of the most complex and significant boundaries in Chinese culture.22 To diminish both of them simultaneously, all scenic illusions use adaptations of European illusionistic painting techniques and depth cues to visually replace walls with spaces and objects that appear to exist tangibly in three dimensions. In order for a viewer to understand a two-dimensional picture (a painting) as a projection of three-dimensional space (reality, or at least the illusion of it), he or she must interpret numerous visual cues in the picture as representing distance and depth in the real world. To create this effect, painters use a variety of depth cues, including
linear perspective (to suggest deep spatial recession);
foreshortening and angular distortion (so objects appear to project or extend
into space);
occlusion (an object that occludes another is probably in front of it);
size constancy (of two objects of presumed equal size, the smaller is farther
away);
resolution (fewer visible details indicate distance);
contrast (objects with less light and shadow contrast are likely farther away);
color (hue changes on comparable objects suggest the darker object is farther
away);
shadows (the position, distortion, and shape of shadows indicate relative
location);
reflectance and scattering (the amount of reflected or scattered light varies
relative to light source and viewer).23
With such depth cues employed in them, scenic illusions do not constitute a failure of normal perception; rather, they result from perfectly normal perceptual capabilities functioning as they should, but producing a nonstandard percept.24 The responses of
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chinese viewers to European art consistently demonstrate that they were able to see the illusions in those paintings, indicating the legibility of most Western pictorial depth cues in the High Qing visual world despite a painting history that did not privilege such representations. However, the act of picturing now looked different than it did before, raising the question of how Chinese visuality was also changing in response to sustained contact with European representational modes. Broadly defined as the social aspect of vision, visuality is useful as a heuristic device to investigate the relationship between vision and representation in cross-cultural contexts.25 When approached in this way, evidence demonstrates there is no single early modern visuality derived from any particular place (including Europe), and that perhaps the only shared value across early modern visuality is its willingness to engage the foreign.26 That willingness varied somewhat with class and social status in early modern China, but there is no question that Western techniques affected Chinese visuality in ways that have yet to be fully understood.
Among the depth cues found in scenic illusion paintings, the importance of linear perspective is particularly clear in Spring’s Peaceful Message. When faced with a perspectival painting, the viewer interprets apparent distance and depth through the perceived position of objects relative to the horizon line and to the apex of the visual angle (the angle at which a viewed object subtends at the eye). In other words, the closer to the horizon and visual angle, the farther away an object appears, especially when size constancy is also at work. To create the impression of a room that recedes away from the viewer, Spring’s Peaceful Message uses pavimento, a common Renaissance pictorial device in which the straight lines of a tiled or paved floor create the orthogonals of linear perspective receding to its single vanishing point. Linear perspective was entirely intelligible to Chinese viewers; however, chiaroscuro and obvious shading