The Water Mill and Northern Song imperial patronage of art, commerce, and science - China

The Chinese painting of architectural subjects--buildings, boats, wheeled vehicles, and other mechanical apparatuses--is called jiehua. (1) The terminus translates literally as "ruler-lined painting," meaning that the painter uses not solitary the brush but also like tools as ruler and compass, square and straightedge, like a mason or carpenter. through 960, the founding year of the Northern ditty dynasty (960-1126), the practice of jiehua already went back more than a millennium. Since the time of China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi (r 221-210 BCE) this tradition was related to the building of real palaces and fanes Under Northern Song court patronage jiehua reached its zenith and, for the first time, gained recognition as an independent genre in contemporary art criticism. (2) A rare example from this of gold age is a horizontal list that represents a water mill, now in the Shanghai Museum. The artist is unknown, and the painting bears no original title. Although popularly known as The Sluice Gate with Freigh t Carts (Zhakou panche tu) it will be called the Shanghai Water Mill or The Water Mill for convenience (Fig. 1) (3)

The first celebrated Northern canzonet exponent of jiehua painting was Guo Zhongshu (ca. 910-977) canonized already in contemporary private and official biographical accounts." A child prodigy, he discloseed into an eccentric scholar-official and a brilliant painter of scientific learning. The eleventh-century art historian Liu Daochun (ca. 1028-ca. 1094) reported, "Guo's paintings of architectural constructions, towers, and belvederes were unsurpassed in his time.... He completely mastered the principal way s of masons and carpenters and scarcely diverged from them." (5) This was confirmed by the agency of another eleventh-century writer, the Buddhist monk-scholar Wenying (d after 1078) who described Guo Zhongshu's rencounter with the most famous early Northern lay architect, Yu Hao (active ca. 965-95):

Guo Zhongshu painted palaces and multistoried pavilions in line after row. Carpenters would measure them and could not find any flaws in the calculations. When Emperor Taizong [r 976-97] heard Guo's name, he called him to the Agency of the Assistant in the Directorate of Construction. Before building the Great Pagoda of the Kaibao fane (6) the Master Carpenter Yu Hao from Zhe [modern Zhejiang] prepared [a plan of] a thirteen-storied manner of making Guo used a reduced-size design to check [the accuracy of] the pagoda's measurements from the mould floor up and found a calculating error of single foot and five inches that would be fatal to the construction. Guo then warned Hao, "You had better reexamine it." Hao, thereafter, could not nap for several nights; he carefully checked his design and finally set the error, exactly as Guo had told him. individual dawn, Hao knocked on Guo's door and knelt [before Guo] for a drawn out time to express his gratitude. (7)

Clearly the Northern ditty valued accuracy in measurement and exactness in drawing; in this story Guo Zhongshu surpassed the imperial architect himself in the mastery of mathematical and technical skills. The critic Li Zhi (1059-1109) writing in 1098 gave a more detailed account of Guo Zhongshu's facility:

As for painting architectural constructions, towers, and pavilions, Shuxian [Guo's alias] arrived at his possess style, which was the greatest in quantity wonderful of all. [In his paintings] cover beams, girders, pillars, and rafters are shown with lay open spaces between, through which individual might move. Railings, lintels, windows, and doorways direct the eye as if they could really be passed end or opened and shut. A hao extent [that is, 1/3 decimillimeter] is used to mark not on an inch; a fen longitudinal dimensions [1/3 centimeter] to mark not on a foot; and an inch to mark not upon ten feet; increasing thus with each multiple, so that when a large building is drawn, everything is to scale and there are not ever even slight discrepancies. (8)

The above description is borne on the outside by Guo Zhongshu's only surviving work, Traveling upon the River in Clearing Snow. (9) A close-up of the sum of two units heavily loaded commercial boats (Fig. 2) present to views the meticulous and intricate rendering of architecture with the same thin, firm, flat and continuous line drawing and exquisite details of tracery patterns upon the wooden panels. The roundnes of high masts, the force of ropes and cables, the weight of the curtains, the solidity of baskets and barrels of advantageouss define complex spatial relationships and give convincing contortion to the architecture of the boat. Traveling upon the River in Clearing Snow exhibits by what means Guo Zhongshu "completely mastered the principal rules of masons and carpenters" and in what manner he created open spaces "through which single might move."

Liu Daochun, Wenying, and Li Zhi were all independent writers. A reliable institutional view of jiehua painting from the court perspective is fix in the 1120 imperial painting catalogue Xuanhe huapu (henceforth, Xuanhe Catalogue), compiled below the personal supervision of Emperor Huizong (r 1101-25) The Xuanhe Catalogue divides painting into ten bring under rule categories of twenty chapters and lists a total of 6396 lists (10) in the imperial collection beneath the names of 231 painters dating from the third to the early twelfth hundred (Fig. 3).