What does it mean that "there are more people than mountains, and water can't be flooded"?

Literal meaning: portrait painting is bigger than a mountain, and water will never be sparkling and floating around. Landscape painting does not give people magnificent significance.

This is a comment, referring to the characteristics of landscape painting in the Northern and Southern Dynasties, that is, "people are bigger than mountains, but water cannot be flooded". Generalized. Landscape painting does not give people magnificent significance.

The painting method of mountains, rivers, trees and stones is naive and simple, and it is known as "People in Yamanoe can't drown water", which embodies the characteristics of early landscape painting.

In China's landscape painting theory, Zhang Yanyuan's "Water can't be submerged, people are more than mountains" is often a powerful argument to discuss the immaturity of landscape painting in the Northern and Southern Dynasties, which also means that landscape painters in the Northern and Southern Dynasties have insufficient ability to grasp the proportional relationship. The later development mainly pays attention to the coordination of the proportion of mountains and rivers, and pays attention to elegance and external charm.

Extended data:

Luoshen Fu Tu: It is a treasure in the collection of Beijing Palace Museum. Silk, color, length 27. 1 cm, width 572.8 cm. It was painted by Gu Kaizhi, a famous painter in the Eastern Jin Dynasty. This painting is based on Cao Zhi's famous Ode to Luoshen, which is a masterpiece handed down by Gu Kaizhi. This Song version retains some features of Gu Kaizhi's art to a certain extent, and we can also get a glimpse of his pen and ink expression from thousands of years.

The whole volume is divided into three parts, which describes the sincere and innocent love story between Cao Zhi and Luo Shen in a tortuous and detailed way. The characters are properly arranged and naturally alternate, overlap and exchange in different time and space, but in the description of mountains and rivers, they all show a sense of space.

The whole painting is unpretentious, just like the painting of mountains, rivers, trees and stones in Silkworm Spinning in Spring. The so-called "there are more people than mountains, and water can't be flooded" embodies the characteristics of early landscape painting. This picture scroll is worthy of being one of the treasures of China's classical painting in terms of content, artistic structure, figure modeling, environmental description and pen and ink expression.