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

CHINESE CALLIGRAPHY

the designs of the ancient script ; but it is not my object in this book to prove such points. The examples given amply show that some connexion existed between the two arts, and I need not go further.

Chinese bronzes of the 12th and 13th centuries B.C. are as varied in form as the pottery. They are rarely symmetrical, for the Chinese have always found asymmetry agreeable, and this preference enlarges the variety of possible forms.

Ancient jades are usually simple in design, but even the simplest of them have unmistakable aesthetic quality. A few bear engravings of dramatic stories; the majority have only natural objects, stylised for the purpose. The bronze fish in Plate VI, for example, bears little resemblance to any fish that ever swam in water, but nevertheless indubitably ‘lives’. Its life is the life of art—the life that stirs in the strokes of a good calligrapher.

The most characteristic Chinese sculptures are the figures of Buddhist and Taoist deities : figures which to many Western people are the very emblem of Chinese art. Here again realism is absent. Neither the expressions of the figures nor their proportions are life-like in the way that many Christian pictures are life-like. Philosophic ideas are conveyed in the modelling of the faces and the attitudes of the figures. Philosophic and religious ideas do not, of course, themselves vary from epoch to epoch, but it is not so much these which are depicted in the sculptures as the artists’ personal responses to the Buddhist and Taoist religions. The power of Chinese sculpture depends not upon mass, as in the West, so muchas upon /ime. From the smallest jade to the most colossal Buddhist image, line is the distinctive quality. Inthe huge figures, where delicacy of feature is not

[ 212 ]