What does grotto art bring us?

Grotto art is a kind of religious culture, based on Buddhist stories, which flourished in Wei and Jin Dynasties, Sui and Tang Dynasties. It absorbs the essence of Indian Candeira art, combines the traditional techniques and aesthetic taste of China's painting and sculpture, and embodies the Buddhist thought and its China process. It can be described as valuable materials for studying China's social history, Buddhist history, art history and the history of cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries.

These grotto arts, which lasted for more than 1000 years, condensed the wisdom of folk artists and left us with rich cultural wealth. Grottoes are a form of religious art, but the scope involved goes far beyond religion and art, which can reflect historical reality and social changes from different angles.

The blending of China traditional culture and foreign Buddhist culture has made the grotto art develop unprecedentedly and opened up a new era in the art history of China. In the process of continuous convergence and integration of Chinese and Western cultures, the China grotto art system with distinctive national style has been formed, which also makes grotto art unique among the world art forests and become the pride of our national culture.

Extended data:

artistic style

Gansu area (the land of sixteen countries and five cool places), from Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes to Yongjing Bingling Temple, and then south to Tianshui McKee Cliff. The themes and styles of his early statues and murals are exactly the same. After the unification of Hexi in the fifth year of Northern Wei Dynasty (439), many monks and believers moved to Pingcheng.

The theme and style of sculptures in caves 16 to 20 and caves 7 and 8 are the same as those in Hexi and Tianshui. This fully shows that the grotto art developed along the route from west to east.

In the middle period of Taihe in the Northern Wei Dynasty (486-499), the Xianbei ruling group implemented the policy of sinicization in order to accelerate the feudalization of the Northern Wei regime and strengthen the suppression of the people in the Central Plains. Reflected in the grotto art, with Yungang and Longmen as the center, no matter what the image, the costumes in the form of Han nationality are adopted.

It developed outward from Pingcheng and Luoyang, the capitals of the Northern Wei Dynasty, to Qinlong and Hexi Grottoes in the west, to Bashu in the south, to Yingzhou (Wanfo Hall in Yixian) in the northeast and to Qing and Xu (Yunmen Mountain and Tuoshan) in the southeast. This is a major change in the development of China Grottoes. According to this development path, the largest grotto statues in China, such as Mogao Grottoes, Maiji Cliff, Bingling Temple and Sigou, after the middle of the Northern Dynasties, can be said to be completely influenced by Yungang and Longmen statues.

At the end of the Northern Dynasty, the Buddha statues and Bodhisattva statues in Cave 72 of Thousand Buddha Cliff in Guangyuan, Sichuan were exactly the same as those in Mackey Cliff in Tianshui, Gansu. Therefore, it can be said that the early grottoes in Sichuan were influenced by Mackey Cliff and Bingling Temple Grottoes.

During the Sui and Tang Dynasties, although the relations of production improved and the productivity increased greatly, the supreme ruler still advocated Buddhism to confuse the people. Buddhism was one of the main religions believed by people from all walks of life at that time, and Dongjing was the center of Buddhism in China. Big temples, such as the Daxiong Hall in Xijing. Hongfu Temple and Fuxian Temple in Tokyo. , have a prayer room.

Moreover, the great temples in Beijing have all kinds of alterations painted by famous painters at that time. The works of Zhang Yanyuan, Duan and others not only record the themes of many temple murals, but also record how beautiful these murals are in style.

This will help spread this artistic style to all parts of the country. Although the murals painted by Mogao Grottoes in different periods of the Tang Dynasty, especially in the early Tang Dynasty and the prosperous Tang Dynasty, are not comparable to the temples in Beijing recorded in the literature, it can be said with certainty that many painting styles are consistent with everyone's painting styles recorded in the history of painting.

Since the Five Dynasties and the Song Dynasty, the grotto art was not as developed as before, and fewer grottoes were dug, so it gradually declined. Statues such as Longgang Mountain and Fowan in Dazu, such as the relief of parents' grace sutra, are closer to people's breath, which is incomparable to previous generations of grotto statues.

References:

China Culture Research Institute-China Grottoes Art

Baidu encyclopedia-grotto art