Where Writing Was the Senior Art

The first six books of this subject are organised around a Western question: how do you get a convincing three-dimensional world onto a flat surface. Perspective, modelling, colour relationships, the materials that make illusion possible, the eventual refusal of all of it.

That is one question. It is not the question, and the clearest demonstration is a tradition that had the technical means to pursue it and did not bother.

In the Chinese literati tradition the senior visual art is calligraphy. Painting is understood as closely related to it, using the same brush, the same ink, the same absorbent paper, assessed by largely the same criteria. A connoisseur who can judge a letter can judge a landscape, because what is being judged in both cases is the quality of the marks.

Xie He, writing around the sixth century, set out six principles for painting in the preface to a book classifying earlier painters. They are usually given in this order: spirit resonance, brush method, correspondence to the object, suitability of colour, composition, and transmission by copying.

Look at the third item. Correspondence to the object, which is to say likeness, the accuracy of the depiction, is fourth in a list of six, behind the quality of the brushwork. The translations of all six vary widely between sinologists and the ordering is stable, and the ordering is the thing that matters.

The first principle, qi yun sheng dong, is the one everybody argues about. Spirit resonance, life-movement, something between vitality and presence. Xie He's view was that without it there is no point examining the rest, which puts an unmeasurable quality above every measurable one.

Why would the brushstroke carry that much weight?

Because of the physics of the medium. Ink on absorbent paper cannot be corrected. The mark records the speed of the hand, the pressure, the angle, the moment of hesitation, the exact point at which the brush was lifted, and none of it can be gone back over. A stroke is the trace of a body doing something once. That is why it reads as evidence of a person, and why the same connoisseurship applies to writing: a brushstroke is handwriting whatever it depicts.

The social half of this is the literati position, and it should be stated as a position rather than a fact. Painting by educated amateurs, for whom it was one accomplishment among poetry and calligraphy and office-holding, was held to be superior to the work of professionals who painted for money, even where the professionals were manifestly more skilled. That argument ran for centuries and it was an argument, with interested parties. A great deal of the Chinese painting now most admired was made by professionals.

Two things to keep straight, because popular accounts run them together.

Xie He does not rank calligraphy against painting. His principles are about painting. The elevation of calligraphy above it is a separate convention, developed later and by people with reasons.

And the structural claim, which is solid: a tradition whose first criterion is the quality of the mark and whose fourth is fidelity of depiction has no urgent problem for perspective to solve. Linear perspective is an answer to a question about accuracy. Put accuracy fourth and the question is not pressing enough to spend a century on, which is not a deficiency. It is a different set of priorities, held deliberately, by people who could see what the alternative would cost them.