In the Forbidden City and other palaces around Beijing, Emperor Qianlong (r. 1736-1795) surrounded himself with monumental paintings of architecture, gardens, people, and faraway places. The best ...artists of the imperial painting academy, including a number of European missionary painters, used Western perspectival illusionism to transform walls and ceilings with visually striking images that were also deeply meaningful to Qianlong. These unprecedented works not only offer new insights into late imperial China s most influential emperor, but also reflect one way in which Chinese art integrated and domesticated foreign ideas.
In Imperial Illusions, Kristina Kleutghen examines all known surviving examples of the Qing court phenomenon of scenic illusion paintings (tongjinghua), which today remain inaccessible inside the Forbidden City. Produced at the height of early modern cultural exchange between China and Europe, these works have received little scholarly attention. Richly illustrated, Imperial Illusions offers the first comprehensive investigation of the aesthetic, cultural, perceptual, and political importance of these illusionistic paintings essential to Qianlong s world.
For more information: http://arthistorypi.org/books/imperial-illusions
Editorial Introduction
The journal of modern craft,
07/2017, Letnik:
10, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This issue, like many others, is defined by diversity: diversity of materials studied, diversity of methodological approach, diversity of argument. Each article has a different medium-specific focus: ...textile and painting, handblock printing, scraps for intricate modelling, jewelry; and the breadth of approaches are evident, from forensic object analysis to ethnographic fieldwork. Within this smorgasbord of content, however, there is one thread running throughout: the Journal’s support of current and recently graduated PhD students.
Moche murals of northern Peru represent one of the great, yet
still largely unknown, artistic traditions of the ancient Americas.
Created in an era without written scripts, these murals are key to
...understandings of Moche history, society, and culture. In this
first comprehensive study on the subject, Lisa Trever develops an
interdisciplinary methodology of "archaeo art history" to examine
how ancient histories of art can be written without texts, boldly
inverting the typical relationship of art to archaeology.
Trever argues that early coastal artistic traditions cannot be
reduced uncritically to interpretations based in much later Inca
histories of the Andean highlands. Instead, the author seeks the
origins of Moche mural art, and its emphasis on figuration, in the
deep past of the Pacific coast of South America. Image
Encounters shows how formal transformations in Moche mural
art, before and after the seventh century, were part of broader
changes to the work that images were made to perform at Huacas de
Moche, El Brujo, Pañamarca, and elsewhere in an increasingly
complex social and political world. In doing so, this book reveals
alternative evidentiary foundations for histories of art and visual
experience.
Spring Outing Painting of Madam Guo is one of the representative works of Zhang Xuan, a famous Chinese court painter of the Tang dynasty (618-907), who was the "leader" of the trend of figure ...painting in the Tang dynasty and had a great influence on later figure painting. The costumes of the characters in the paintings not only show the artistic aesthetics of the prosperous Tang dynasty, but also reflect the rich cultural connotation. At present, the research on this painting is mainly about character discrimination and painting appreciation. There are few studies involving the costumes in this painting. With the rapid development of digital clothing technology, it provides a new way and path for the restoration of ancient costumes. Based on the costume archaeology of Spring Outing Painting of Madam Guo, this paper uses 3D virtual simulation and reverse engineering technology to restore the costume style of the characters in the picture, realize the digital restoration and protection of the style drawing, paper pattern, and 3D simulation drawing of the characters' costumes in the picture. Finally, we introduce the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) to comprehensively evaluate the costume restoration effect. Our proposed method solves the problem of the constraints of time and space on the presentation of ancient traditional costumes, promotes the excellent historical culture of China, and provides a certain reference for the modern redesign of ancient costumes.
The nonplanar shape of a painting as well as practical constraints often result in the painting's surface not being parallel to the plane in that the measurement head of a MA‐XRF scanner is being ...moved. Changing the working distance affects the measurement geometry, so that the sensitivity for the same element may vary throughout the investigated area and induce visible artifacts. These artifacts are especially visible when different scans of the same painting are stitched together. In this article, we present an approach to correct for the variation of the measurement distance. We explored using an intrinsic part of the XRF data set, the Ar signal from the air, to estimate the distance between surface and instrument. The model is developed based on fundamental parameter calculations and a measurement of a NIST 610 standard and is verified on a set of scans of Rembrandt's ‘Portrait of Oopjen Coppit (1611–1689)’.
For Chinese font images, when all their strokes are replaced by pattern elements such as flowers and birds, they become flower–bird character paintings, which are traditional Chinese art treasures. ...The generation of flower–bird painting requires professional painters’ great efforts. How to automatically generate these paintings from font images? There is a huge gap between the font domain and the painting domain. Although many image-to-image translation frameworks have been proposed, they are unable to handle this situation effectively. In this study, a novel method called font-to-painting network (F2PNet) is proposed for font-to-painting translation. Specifically, an encoder equipped with dilated convolutions extracts features of the font image, and then the features are fed into the domain translation module for mapping the font feature space to the painting feature space. The acquired features are further adjusted by the refinement module and utilised by the decoder to obtain the target painting. The authors apply adversarial loss and cycle-consistency loss to F2PNet and further propose a loss term, which is called recognisability loss and makes the generated painting have font-level recognisability. It is proved by experiments that F2PNet is effective and can be used as an unsupervised image-to-image translation framework to solve more image translation tasks.
Icon "The Miracle of St. George about the Serpent" (the first third of the 18th century) and painting "Still Life with Chum Salmon" (M. Sokolov, 1930s) are studied with the aid of IR reflectography ...using a short-wave IR camera (0.9-1.7 microm). Hidden elements of the image that are not observed in the visible spectral range are revealed.
The study of cultural artifact provenance, tracing ownership and preservation, holds significant importance in archaeology and art history. Modern technology has advanced this field, yet challenges ...persist, including recognizing evidence from diverse sources, integrating sociocultural context, and enhancing interactive automation for comprehensive provenance analysis. In collaboration with art historians, we examined the handscroll, a traditional Chinese painting form that provides a rich source of historical data and a unique opportunity to explore history through cultural artifacts. We present a three-tiered methodology encompassing artifact, contextual, and provenance levels, designed to create a "Biography" for handscroll. Our approach incorporates the application of image processing techniques and language models to extract, validate, and augment elements within handscroll using various cultural heritage databases. To facilitate efficient analysis of non-contiguous extracted elements, we have developed a distinctive layout. Additionally, we introduce ScrollTimes, a visual analysis system tailored to support the three-tiered analysis of handscroll, allowing art historians to interactively create biographies tailored to their interests. Validated through case studies and expert interviews, our approach offers a window into history, fostering a holistic understanding of handscroll provenance and historical significance.
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