SHÊN KUA.
a.d. 1030-1093
[A distinguished scholar who, in accordance with ancient custom, was employed in military expeditions, and who was held responsible for a defeat in which 60,000 Chinese soldiers perished and banished to Shensi. He ranks among the highest as an art critic]
AUREOLES.
WHEN painters paint Buddha’s aureole, they make it flat and round like a fan. If his body is deflected, then the aureole is also deflected,―a serious blunder. Such a one is only thinking of Buddha as a graven image, and does not know that the roundness of his aureole is everlasting. In like manner, when Buddha is represented as walking, his aureole is made to tail out behind him, and this is called the wind-borne aureole,―also a serious blunder. For Buddha’s aureole is a divine aureole which even a universe-wrecking hurricane could not move, still less could our light breezes flutter it.
AERIAL PERSPECTIVE.
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,
- ↑ A famous painter of landscape. Died a.d. 965 of delirium tremens.
