Chinese calligraphy : an introduction to its aesthetic and technique : with 6 plates and 155 text illustratons

OTHER FORMS OF CHINESE ART

For us, sculpture includes most of the arts which in the West are generically called plastic: engraving on stone ; modelling in earthenware ; the casting of bronze and iron ; engraving on wood ; and the carving of jade.

Architecture comprises not only the planning of buildings but the designing of furniture.

In the pages that follow I propose to discuss Chinese art under these three heads, relating each branch to calligraphy and proving, I hope, that an understanding of calligraphy is necessarily a substantial aid to the comprehension of Chinese art in general.

PAINTING AND CALLIGRAPHY

It is easy to see that no rigid barrier exists between these two arts. I explained in Chapter II how the earliest forms of the written characters can be regarded as pictures; and although the later forms develop further and further away from direct pictorial representation, it is still possible to trace in them common visual links. There is, for example, a strong similarity between the ‘ Seal’ characters of the Chou dynasty and the designs on bronzes of the same period.t In the Han dynasty, when Li-Shu, K‘ai-Shu, Hsing-Shu and Ts‘ao-Shu were all practised, the linear movements discernible in contemporary paintings bore a marked resemblance to those in these four styles of calligraphy. Han tiles and mirrors, too, engraved with both characters and designs, follow the same principles of patternization as Han calligraphy. If you compare the painting of

* No paintings from Chou or Han times remain to-day. We are accus-

tomed to think of the designs, after paintings, made on bronzes, tiles, &c., as paintings. [ 207 ]