Gems of Chinese Literature/Shên Kua-Aerial Perspective

by Shên Kua

In painting oxen and tigers, it is always customary to paint the hair, but the hair of horses is not painted. On my asking an artist why this was, he replied that a horse’s hair is too fine, and cannot be brought out; but when I suggested that a rat’s hair was still finer and yet was always painted, he had nothing to say. Now a horse is never seen in a painting to be more than a foot in size, which is a great proportionate reduction, and therefore the hair would be far too fine to be reproduced; whereas a rat generally has about the same measurement as in real life, and therefore the hair ought to be painted. This principle would seem to apply equally to the ox and to the tiger; the hair however of these animals is long, and a distinction has accordingly to be made. Li Ch‘êng,^[1] whenever he put kiosques, pagodas, or other buildings, on the mountains of his landscapes, painted them with cocked-up eaves, so that the spectator looked upwards and saw the inner part; because, he said, the point of view was below the object, just as a man standing beneath a pagoda sees above him the rafters of the eaves. This reasoning is faulty. For in landscape there is a method of looking at big things as if they were small (aerial perspective). If people looked at imitation hills in the same way that they look at real hills, that is, looking from the base up to the summit, it would only be possible to see one range at a time, and not range behind range; neither would the ravines and valleys in the mountains be visible. Similarly, you ought not to see the middle court of a house, nor what is going on in the back premises. You cannot lay down the rule that if you have a man on the east side, then the west side of the hill must contain the distant scenery, and vice versâ; under such conditions no picture could possibly be painted. Li Ch‘êng did not know the method by which big objects are made to look small. By this method effects of height and distance can be more skilfully secured than by simply cocking up the corners of houses.

---

1. A famous painter of landscape. Died a.d. 965 of delirium tremens.