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Reinventing the Past: Antiquarianism in East Asian Art and Visual Culture—Part 2 |
< Back Li Cheng and a Landscape Past for the Northern Song Court Ping Foong University of Chicago This paper interprets the preface to the landscape section of the Xuanhe huapu (Catalog of Paintings in the Xuanhe Collection) as a court decision to assert imperial prerogative over the prestigious genre through a reassessment of their material sources: the imperial collection of works by Li Cheng and his followers, and the historical record of landscape painting at the Hanlin Institute. Our understanding of the importance of Li Cheng in the Northern Song Dynasty owes to this preface from around 1120, textual evaluations in earlier art historical critiques, and several important surviving works associated with Li and his style. Even as we take these concurrences as evidence of the widespread nature of this tradition, I suggest that the authors of the Xuanhe huapu envisioned a historiography of a particular landscape past that privileged Song over previous dynasties, and one which reclaimed a legacy which had, for the past century, represented the taste of scholar-officials at the Hanlin. |
