Liáng Yuándì shānshuǐ sōngshí gé 梁元帝山水松石格
Standards for Mountains, Waters, Pines, and Stones, by Emperor Yuán of Liáng by 蕭繹 (Xiāo Yì, 508–555, 梁元帝, zhuàn 撰; attributed)
About the work
A short rhymed-prose treatise on the technique of landscape painting traditionally attributed to Xiāo Yì 蕭繹 (Liáng Yuándì 梁元帝, 508–555), the bibliophile-emperor of the late Liáng (see 蕭繹 person note). The text is a rhymed gé 格 (“model / standard”) in roughly 250 characters, structured as a sequence of four-character couplets. It instructs the painter on (1) the laying out of fěnbì 粉壁 (limewashed walls) and sùpíng 素屏 (plain silk screens) for landscape painting, with attention to the relative scaling of paired peaks and the xiāngyìng 相映 (mutual reflection) of head-and-tail and the xiāngjìn 相近 (close-pairing) of body-and-belly; (2) the principle that trees, stones, clouds, and waters have no fixed standard form, but follow internal coherence; (3) the seasonal palette: qiū máo dōng gǔ, xià yīn chūn yīng 秋毛冬骨,夏蔭春英 (“autumn fur, winter bone, summer shade, spring blossom”), with hot crimsons paired against cold blues; (4) the technique of pòmò 破墨 (broken-ink) for receding-ink modulation, with high ink keeping a green tone (gāo mò yóu lǜ 高墨猶綠) and low ink keeping a russet tone (xià mò yóu chéng 下墨猶赬); (5) the order of laying out a landscape in cloud-shadowed terrain (stones first, then branches and twigs); and (6) the closing injunction that the bǐfǎ 筆法 (brush-method) here transmitted is to be kept secret and not divulged in the household courtyard.
The present recension (KR3h0096) is one of two transmitted versions of the work in the Kanripo corpus; the other (KR3h0097) carries the parallel title Shānshuǐ sōngshí gé without the imperial prefix, with somewhat smoother prose and two minor textual variants (KR3h0096 has jiàn pò 濺樸 / yùn shénqíng sù 運神情素 / pēn zhī wèi huí 噴之蔚回 where KR3h0097 has the more standard jiàn hōng 濺渹 / yùn shénqíng (then sùpíng lián yú) / pēn zhī wèi róng 噴之蔚榮). The KR3h0097 reading agrees with the Sòng-period transmission preserved in Tàipíng yùlǎn and the Lìdài mínghuà jì.
Abstract
The Shānshuǐ sōngshí gé is one of the earliest preserved technical-instructional Chinese statements on landscape painting, and the only such statement attributed to a reigning Liáng emperor. The attribution to Liáng Yuándì is conventional but disputed: Xiāo Yì was indeed an accomplished painter — his Zhígòng tú 職貢圖 (illustrated catalogue of foreign tribute embassies, partially preserved in a Sòng copy in the National Museum of China) is one of the rare surviving sixth-century Chinese paintings — but the work is not catalogued under his name in Suí shū · Jīngjí zhì. The first secure citations occur in the late-Táng Lìdài mínghuà jì of Zhāng Yànyuǎn (847), under the title Shānshuǐ sōngshí gé and attributed to Liáng Yuándì. Internal evidence is mixed: the rhymed-prose form is consistent with mid-sixth-century Liáng court literary practice, but several technical terms (especially pòmò, the seasonal-palette formula, and the use of fěnbì / sùpíng in opposition) are otherwise first attested in mid-Táng painting practice. Modern critical opinion (Bush 1985, Fong 1992) is divided: some accept the attribution as broadly authentic but heavily reworked in transmission, others read the work as a mid-Táng pseudepigraphic composition placed under the great name of the bibliophile-emperor in the manner of the Bǐzhèn tú (KR3h0093). The composition window is here set as 540–555: the upper bracket reflects Xiāo Yì’s mature literary period at Jiānglíng before his accession; the lower is his death. (If the work is genuinely Táng pseudepigraphy, both brackets are merely the assumed dates of the work-as-attributed.) Together with the slightly earlier Huà shānshuǐ xù of Zōng Bǐng (KR3h0095) and the Gǔhuà pǐnlù of Xiè Hè (KR3h0001, with its famous “Six Laws”), the Shānshuǐ sōngshí gé is one of the principal Liùcháo / early-Táng documents of Chinese landscape-painting theory.
Translations and research
- Bush, Susan, and Hsio-yen Shih, eds. Early Chinese Texts on Painting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985 (rep. Hong Kong University Press, 2012). [Includes annotated translation of the Shān-shuǐ sōng-shí gé and discussion of the attribution question.]
- Fong, Wen C. Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy 8th–14th Century. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992. [Treats the Shān-shuǐ sōng-shí gé as background for the development of Sòng-period landscape theory.]
- Sullivan, Michael. The Birth of Landscape Painting in China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962.
- Yú Jiàn-huá 俞劍華 (ed.). Zhōng-guó huà-lùn lèi-biān 中國畫論類編. Beijing: Rén-mín měi-shù chū-bǎn-shè, 1957 (rep. 1986). [Includes both the Shān-shuǐ sōng-shí gé recensions.]
- Acker, William R. B. (trans.). Some T’ang and Pre-T’ang Texts on Chinese Painting. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1954, 1974. [The standard English translation of the Lì-dài míng-huà jì in which the Shān-shuǐ sōng-shí gé is preserved.]
Other points of interest
The four-character couplet qiū máo dōng gǔ, xià yīn chūn yīng (autumn fur, winter bone, summer shade, spring blossom) became proverbial in subsequent Chinese landscape theory as the principle of seasonal differentiation in landscape painting; Sòng-period landscape masters such as Guō Xī cite it directly. The text’s use of pòmò 破墨 (“broken ink”) is one of the earliest premodern Chinese references to the technique, otherwise associated with mid-Táng painters such as Wáng Wéi 王維 and Wáng Mò 王墨. The doublet of two recensions (KR3h0096 / KR3h0097) reflects the parallel transmission of the work through the Tàipíng yùlǎn and Lìdài mínghuà jì lines; the variant readings between them document the difficulties of transmission for short pre-Táng theoretical texts.