What is a "vivid" theory?

It was not until the end of Han Dynasty that intellectuals took part in China's paintings. During the Wei and Jin Dynasties, literati engaged in painting, which was almost equivalent to a painter, hence the theory of painting. Gu Kaizhi is not only the embodiment of China's painting consciousness, but also the master of painting techniques at that time, and the earliest writer of painting theory. Gu Kaizhi has three paintings: On Painting, Praise of Painting in Wei Jinsheng and Painting Yuntai Mountain. Among these works, Gu Kaizhi first put forward the theory that the purpose of painting is "vivid", and the quality of painting ultimately depends on vivid or not. "On painting" cloud:

God is a ghost mountain. He has a dream.

Beautiful shapes, sizes, numbers of yin and yang, and exquisite traces are all rare in the world. It goes without saying that the sacred instrument is in the heart and the hand is called the eye.

Although metaphysics prevailed in Wei and Jin Dynasties, Gu Kaizhi was first and foremost a simple artist. In his interpretation, vivid painting is the purpose, and it needs to be realized by imitating nature, that is, "writing form". Therefore, it is a gift from heaven to study "formal beauty", "size system", "number of yin and yang" and "exquisite trace" with great concentration, so as to "convey the spirit with form" and obtain the rhyme of one or two "gods" through painting. Here, Gu Kaizhi expressed the idea of attaching importance to people's "dignity and inferiority", rather than appearance and some trivial external things. He emphasized that painters should grasp people's mental state, temperament and manner, and observe people's thinking cultivation by capturing people's eyes, thus revealing and conveying people's essence. "On Painting" also puts forward some arguments such as "bone method" and "fixing the old and matching the potential". "Bone method" is to compare people's inner mental outlook with people's skeletal characteristics and apply it to the evaluation of painting pens; "Stereotype" emphasizes the cutting and arrangement of subject matter content in painting.

The Six Dynasties is the foundation period of China's traditional painting aesthetics, and also the period of active painting criticism. Gu Kaizhi's theory of "vivid expression" was the most famous painting thought at that time, which provided a theoretical basis for another active painter at that time, Sheikh (479-502), who summarized the theory of "six methods" in his book "Ancient Painting Catalogue". The so-called "six methods", namely, "1. Expressive verve; 2. Writing with a pen for bone; 3. Pictographs for objects; 4. Color following the class; 5. Business position; 6. Tone and model writing", among which the theory of "expressive verve" is the core. Influenced by it, a generation of painters regard "vivid" as the highest standard of figure painting, and figure painting seems to have the right path. Next, landscape painting and flower-and-bird painting also put forward the standard of "vivid".

The earliest existing landscape painting-You Chuntu.

The painting style of Sui Dynasty is a link between the past and the future, with the characteristics of "exquisiteness and beauty" summarized by Zhang Yanyuan. Painters from all over the country and concentrated in Beijing are mostly good at religious subjects and describing aristocratic life. As for the landscape as people's activity environment, landscape painting has become an independent painting variety because it pays attention to scale and better shows the spatial effect of "mountains and rivers are far and near, thousands of miles away".

Zhan Ziqian (550-604) entered the Sui Dynasty in the Northern Qi and Northern Zhou Dynasties. In the Sui Dynasty, he served as a doctor and an account supervisor in North Korea. Zhan Ziqian's paintings are "very detailed and confused by color", which obviously inherits Gu Kaizhi's painting method. The slender drawing of silkworms in A History of Women and A Picture of Luoshen has evolved into a bright and magnificent landscape picture in You Chuntu by Zhan Ziqian. In the era of Zhan Ziqian, landscape painting has not yet become an independent painting. Like Gu Kaizhi, Zhan Ziqian is a comprehensive painter, but he shows a greater preference for depicting natural scenery. Xuanhe Painting Spectrum says that the mountains and rivers he painted are "far away, so there are thousands of miles of interest at hand", which shows that he is good at expressing the magnificence of natural mountains and rivers in his paintings with a sense of space. Zhan Ziqian is considered as a painter who links the past with the future. On the one hand, he inherited the techniques of Wei and Jin Dynasties, on the other hand, he previewed new painting styles, especially his landscape paintings, which were enlightening to the development of painting in Tang and Song Dynasties. Tang, a critic of painting and calligraphy in Yuan Dynasty, even rated him as "the ancestor of painting in Tang Dynasty".

You Chuntu is the earliest scroll painting and the earliest landscape painting in China. It has been preserved by the royal family and famous collectors, and it is the only existing work of Zhan Ziqian in China. The original works include Song Huizong's (1082- 1 135) Evonne's "Zhan Ziqian You Chuntu" calligraphy and painting, with the inscription and postscript of Emperor Qianlong of the Qing Dynasty on the top left of the picture and the seals of many royal families and famous collectors. This painting depicts the spring outing of the nobles with cyan and green re-coloring, with fine and powerful pens and bright colors. Ma is as small as a bean, but he is meticulously portrayed. This painting broke away from the position of taking landscape as the background of figure painting and became an independent painting, reflecting the face of China's early independent landscape painting.

The main content of "You Chuntu" is to describe the aristocratic spring outing. The countryside is full of spring, spring blossoms, towering mountains, vast water waves, trees turning green and auspicious clouds surging. The embankment winds into the distance, full of green, with arch bridges and pavilions in the foreground. Elegant people ride horses, walk or row boats, go up mountains in groups and swim in the lakes and mountains. Looking at the picture from top to bottom, the distant view and close view converge to the middle view, so that all kinds of scenery are completely unified in one picture, showing a sense of depth. As a whole, it is composed with a big diagonal, and the green hills are opposite to the hillside, opening and closing, and the spring water flows from right down to left up, which changes properly, activating the vitality hidden between heaven and earth and bringing a vibrant scene. The mountains, trees and stones in the painting are all empty, only the colors are rendered, and the pen is very thin and has changed a lot. In the use of color, because we want to emphasize the green of trees in Spring Mountain, we have formed a unique style, which is called "green method" by later generations. This method has a beautiful name because of its gorgeous picture effect and later development: "Jinbi Landscape".

China art historians generally believe that the appearance of You Chuntu is evidence that China's landscape paintings bid farewell to the naive stage of "there are more people than mountains, and water cannot be flooded". From Han Dynasty to Gu Kaizhi, the representation of natural scenery painting was still symbolic. In Zhan Ziqian's paintings, people see the painter's efforts to restore the natural order. When the painter sincerely admired the beauty of Yangchun, he realized the position and proportion of people in the objective environment. In terms of color, mineral pigments are still widely used, but compared with silk paintings in Han dynasty, it can be clearly seen that painters focus on coloring and dyeing. Although traditional symbolic techniques are still used to deal with the white clouds lingering in the distant mountains, symbolic flat painting techniques are less used as a whole, and stippling techniques are more used to match the distance of composition, so that the picture is closer to the real, natural, bright and dreamy scene.

As the earliest extant work, You Chuntu, like a textbook, embodies the basic characteristics of China's landscape painting, such as feasibility, prospect, swimability and livability, and confirms the composition rule of "mountains take water as blood, vegetation as hair and smoke as rhyme" mentioned by Guo in Lin Zhi. Water takes mountains as its surface, pavilions as its eyebrows and fishing as its soul. Therefore, the water in the mountain is beautiful, the pavilion is bright and the fishing is wide. The layout of this landscape is also. As a painter with simple ideas in his early days, Zhan Ziqian's willingness to be realistic through You Chuntu is very obvious, which is quite different from the concept that literati painters in Song and Yuan Dynasties blindly emphasize the subjectivity of painting and "talk about it from the chest". He must have been infected by a scene or even a specific experience. Try to describe it as truly as possible. For example, the breeze is expressed by rippling waterlines, and the seasonal feeling of spring is determined by the stone green on the platform and the flowers dyed with pastels. Zhan Ziqian's "multicolored landscape" includes two forms of expression called "green landscape" and "ink landscape", but they are not particularly distinctive, which to some extent reflects the confusion that the realistic intention and expression methods of his time have not yet reached unity.