"When typesetting, different parts of Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains still surprise me from time to time. How can it be so good? How can it be? " Chen Danqing made such a sigh in the first chapter of A Stranger, A Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers. This masterpiece was written by Wang Ximeng, an unknown young painter in the Northern Song Dynasty. Painted at the age of eighteen, he died in his early twenties, just like a flash in the pan.
Tomorrow, this painting, which is regarded as one of the "Top Ten Famous Paintings in China", will be exhibited at the Wumen Gate of the Forbidden City. Because a large number of mineral pigments are used in the picture scroll, in order to protect the picture scroll, since the founding of New China, the Map of a Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains has only been exhibited three times. Its magnitude is no less than the Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival exhibited in Wuying Hall of the Forbidden City. There are too many puzzles left by Wang Ximeng and A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains. This time, we invited Hui Yu, a member of the National Cultural Relics Appraisal Committee and a research librarian of the Palace Museum, to decrypt the map of a thousand miles of rivers and mountains for you.
At the end of the Northern Song Dynasty, Wang Ximeng, a talented painter, painted the green landscape A Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers, which was the longest scroll in the Song Dynasty, with a length of 5 1.5 cm and a width of1.5 cm. There is no author's name on the picture. At the end of the volume, Cai Jing added that the author of this picture is "Ximeng", which was recorded by Emperor Qianlong in "Shiqu Baodi". 1922, Puyi stole the palace in the name of rewarding Pu Jie. After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, the picture disappeared. The cultural relics market that appeared in Beijing at the beginning of liberation was acquired by antique dealers. It was handed over to the Cultural Relics Administration of the Ministry of Culture (now National Cultural Heritage Administration), and 1953 was handed over to the Palace Museum.
Where was the map of a thousand miles across the country drawn?
Where was the map of a thousand miles across the country drawn? Is there any hint about its painting name? This volume is a realistic landscape painting, and the scenery in the painting has no conceptual factors. With Wang Ximeng's short life experience and traffic conditions at that time, he didn't have time to travel many famous mountains and rivers, and he could only summarize and extract a few victories.
The mountains in the painting stand on the banks of rivers, lakes and swamps. In the territory under the jurisdiction of the Northern Song Dynasty, only Lushan Mountain on Poyang Lake has this feature. The painting shows the open water, with grass plants nearby and vast smoke waves in the distance, like a long swamp lake, which is very similar to the wetland and swamp landforms of Poyang Lake. Plants such as bamboo forest, camphor tree and osmanthus tree and bamboo products such as bamboo fence, bamboo leaves, coconut shells and hats. And labor scenes such as punting boats with bamboo poles and digging river mud are obviously the Jiangnan Lake area. The undulating landforms and the perspective of looking at the mountains on the lake inspired the painter. Most of the modeling elements of the mountains and Shui Bo in the painting come from the Lushan Mountain peak overlooking the Gulf Stream of Poyang Lake.
There are unique local sacrificial places and ships in the painting.
At the foot of the mountain in the middle of the picture scroll, a tile-roofed courtyard surrounded by bamboo fences is a place where literati live in seclusion. There is someone sitting in the front yard, and a tall dome-shaped thatched cottage is built in the middle of the backyard, with a vertical shaft hanging in it. It stands in the most important place in the courtyard and must be a place of pilgrimage. In the Zhou Wuwang era, Kuang Yu's seven brothers went up the mountain to build a house to practice together, and later they all became immortals, leaving only an empty thatched cottage. Later, Kuang Yu lived in seclusion as Lushan Mountain, also known as Kuang Yu Mountain. Kuang Yin was later named Lushan God by Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty. According to Yu Shun, a poet of the Northern Song Dynasty, when he visited Lushan Mountain on 1072, "There is a Kuangjun Temple in the west of Tongyin Bridge." The courtyard in the painting is suspected to be Kuangjun Temple (Figure 2). If there is a wooden bridge not far away, will it be a "sound bridge"? The vault in the painting can't be a relic of Kuang's family, but it should be a form for future generations to commemorate him. On the side of another temple dedicated to many gods, there is also a vault, but Kuang Shen retired to the last place. These parts show that the scene painted by this map has the characteristics of the landmark buildings of Lushan Mountain at that time.
There are many kinds of ships in the painting, mainly passenger ships and oil tankers. There is also a strange catamaran pedaling boat running in the lake (Figure 3), which uses the physical principle of rolling to transmit power and keeps paddling forward like a water pedal. According to legend, this kind of wheeled ship first appeared in the Eastern Jin Dynasty, 1 13 1. Farmers in Dongting Lake, Zhong Xiang and Yang Mo, invented a large boat by using the captured Song Jun material craftsman Gao Xuan, that is, pedaling to improve the speed of the boat to cope with the pursuit of the imperial water army. Its principle is the pedal catamaran in the painting, as described at the end of Song Zhongxing Chronicle. During the Tang and Song Dynasties, the origin and use of this clipper mainly concentrated in the lake area in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River.
The most prominent thing in the painting is the simultaneous appearance of two waterfalls and four waterfalls. The quadruple waterfall is a rare natural landscape. It appears at the same time as the Double Waterfalls, which is quite unique. This is a natural landscape that can only be encountered by Jiuli Lake, a scenic spot in Xianyou (now Fujian) during the Tang and Song Dynasties. Through the description of the magnificent scene of the triple waterfall in Lushan Mountain, the painter may come into contact with this waterfall with strong regional characteristics and integrate it into the picture.
The architectural style in the book A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains is the richest. Mr. Fu Xinian made a thorough and detailed study on the types, structures and uses of various buildings in the book, and determined that they have the characteristics of Jiangnan or Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Among them, the unique bridge in the Northern Song Dynasty was Changmu Bridge, and a cross-shaped corridor was built in the middle of the bridge to avoid the wind and rain. There are passers-by resting in the upper and lower floors of the corridor, and the cross building is a popular style in the Tang and Song Dynasties (Figure 5). Fu Xinian, academician of China Academy of Engineering and director of the National Cultural Relics Appraisal Committee, wrote "Architecture of Wang Ximeng in Northern Song Dynasty (Journal of the Palace MuseumNo. 1979 No.02)", which holds that the prototype of the long bridge was probably taken from the long bridge in Wujiang, Jiangsu (now Wujiang District, Suzhou) and was built in the eighth year of Northern Song Dynasty (1048). Originally a single-plank bridge, Su Shi once said: "The long bridge has never crossed the sky, and the big pavilion presses the waves. "This bridge was changed to a stone bridge in the Yuan Dynasty, with a total length of more than 230 meters.
Therefore, the book A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains is not a sketch of Lushan Mountain. It takes Lushan Mountain and Poyang Lake as the main scenery, including the scenery of other areas covered by the painter's footprints, which provides us with an opportunity to study the "world" he saw. Dividing the scenery in the book "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains" by region, the southernmost scenery is the double waterfalls and four waterfalls in Xianyou, Fujian, along the southeast coast of Fujian, and then to the northwest, to Lushan and Poyang Lake in the northwest of Jiangxi, and taking pictures of the outlines of Lushan and Poyang Lake wetlands, lake boats and houses. In Wu Jun, it photographed the Dragon Bridge in Suzhou. On the way north, it photographed the ships and passenger ships it saw.
The understanding of Wang Ximeng in the history of painting comes from the postscript of Cai Jing, then prime minister of Shangshu, after the volume of A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains: "Zhenghe was given on April 1st of the third year. Ximeng is eighteen. He used to study painting and was called to China Library. The number of paintings is not very hard. Knowing that its nature can be taught, I taught it and taught myself. No more than half a year old, but this is the way to get in. I went to Jiazhi because I gave it to the minister Beijing, saying that all scholars in the world are doing it. " (Figure 6) It can be seen that when Cai Jing wrote the inscription, Ximeng was 18 years old, that is, Wang Ximeng was born in the Shaosheng period of Zhezong (1096). The most direct message of this postscript is that Ximeng studied painting in Kaifeng and went to the library to be a small official after graduation. Later, benefiting from religion, it was painted into a volume of "Thousands of Miles of Rivers and Mountains" from113. Collectors in the early Qing Dynasty said in Poems on Paintings that their surname was Wang, and they died after painting this painting in their early twenties.
At the beginning of Hui Zong's accession to the throne, in order to establish the concept of five mountains, hundreds of candidates were called to take the exam, and most of them were very dissatisfied with Hui Zong. In order to train painting talents, 1 104, Song Huizong founded the only royal painting school in the history of China, which only existed for 23 years. According to records, the number of students (students) is "30".
The materials related to painting are very scarce, which can be supplemented in imperial academy in the Northern Song Dynasty. For example, to apply for imperial academy, you must have the recommendation of a quality officer, and so must painting enrollment. It takes about three years to complete all kinds of examinations in imperial academy, so the academic system of painting will not exceed that of imperial academy. Three years later, 1 107, the first batch of students graduated, and Wang Ximeng 13 entered the painting. According to the admission rules, Wang Ximeng got the help of an official and entered painting early. Students who study painting enjoy the food, accommodation, stationery and painting tools provided by the court, but the children of scholars and craftsmen live separately.
First, painting, like imperial academy, belongs to imperial academy, but it is one file lower than imperial academy. Calligraphy and painting became one, and a room was built in imperial academy. Imperial academy's position is unique. Go out of Xuande Gate, the south gate of ouchi, that is, Yujie. It passes through Zhuquemen in the inner city and Jinlong Bridge on Cai River, and imperial academy is just to the south of the bridge. The painting is there, not far from Imperial College, Hiram's Hospital and downtown south of the city.
What Wang Ximeng and his disciples learned was "the industry of painting, which means Buddhism, figures, mountains and rivers, birds and animals, flowers and trees, houses and trees". Painting attaches great importance to improving students' comprehensive cultural quality, and the cultural lessons of "scholar flow" and "miscellaneous flow" are different, both of which are "Yi", "Shangshu" and "Zhong". The examination requirements for painting are the same. According to "Song Yao Hui Edited Confucianism III", it is recorded that "the examination of painting is not to imitate the predecessors, but the modality of things is natural and the brushwork is noble. "The painter must pass the exam if he wants to enter the Hanlin Painting Academy. Huizong personally wrote a topic to recruit talented people, often with poetry as the topic, asking students to do their best, daydreaming infinitely, and rejecting straightforward and graphic painting ideas, so as to promote court painters to improve their literary accomplishment and ingenious painting atmosphere. Take Deng Chun's Painting Suis in the Southern Song Dynasty as an example. The phrase "selling restaurants by the bamboo lock bridge" has no hidden meaning. Mediocre people only paint spires or kisses, or even restaurants. Li Tang drew the barren hills by himself, and stretched out the pole to see the hidden meaning. Li Tang later became the first of the "Four Great Masters in Southern Song Dynasty".
1 1 10, Wang Ximeng studied painting for about three years. I'm afraid he failed to pass the exam and was called into the Forbidden Library, which is the central warehouse for storing tax files. This library is located at Jinyaomen, the outer city of Kaifeng. In 1995, Song Taizong made great efforts to establish a strict tax file system, and ordered the central salt and iron, taxation, household departments and local governments to set up shelves to store tax files. This kind of local archives should be sent to the third library, the archives room of the central fiscal and taxation organ in the Northern Song Dynasty, which accumulated for 10 years, and the archives could not be piled up. Therefore, in 1005, Zhenzong added a special warehouse to manage these fiscal and tax files, that is, the library, and the library sent the files that had been five years to the library for filing. Wang Ximeng works in this administrative organization that has nothing to do with painting art. His errand is to log in and put aside the files handed over by the Three Divisions. He will also "make long scrolls with big paper according to the actual order" and "write accounts" like a grassroots librarian ... write stickers, seal notes and seal them ... without damage or loss. In the library, all his previous painting experience was almost in vain, except for objectively laying the foundation for Wang Ximeng to control the picture frame in the future.
Song Huizong personally taught Wang Ximeng?
Song Taizu has set up the Scout's Military Department, and it is popular to train boys to learn, so as to adapt to the development of civil affairs from generation to generation. Hui Zong even prefers prodigies. From Injong to Hui Zong Dynasty, 20 people gave scholarships to prodigies. Wang Ximeng is the kind of new progress in painting that Huizong is looking for. His appearance was nourished by the social custom of attaching importance to prodigy in Song Dynasty. Wang Ximeng was probably recommended by Cai Jing and presented his paintings to Hui Zong many times. Hui Zong was not satisfied with his lack of skills, but found that he still had artistic wisdom and was worth teaching, so he taught painting himself.
Hui Zong's kindness to Ximeng does not stop there. The material used by Wang Ximeng to draw a map of thousands of miles across the country is palace silk. Hui Zong must have donated money to Wang Ximeng and provided bright mineral pigments. At the same time, many court painters and Hui Zong's representative writers accepted gifts from the emperor. In the years around 1 1 12, a number of colorful figures and flowers and birds were painted, such as Hui Zong's "Ruihetu" volume and the anonymous "Qin Ting Tu" axis. It can be inferred that Hui Zong wanted to improve the skills of using colors in court painting at this time.
A generation of talented teenagers are exhausted?
It took Wang Ximeng less than half a year to finish the book "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains". Obviously, he is eager to present such a huge and detailed work. Could it be the first unusual day of the third year in power (1 1 13)? Hui Zong accepted it and seemed very satisfied, so he gave it to Cai Jing on April 1 day of the following year.
If Ximeng really died early, it was mostly because she was in a hurry to work. The area of "thousands of miles of rivers and mountains" is equivalent to more than 60 square meters. In terms of the experience of contemporary meticulous painters and the lighting conditions for painting, it will take at least half a year, not to mention the Northern Song Dynasty. This will overdraw a teenager's physical strength and energy, prompting him to work so hard, mainly to get Hui Zong's approval and leave the library early to enter the Hanlin Painting Academy.
Wang Ximeng is a practitioner of Song Huizong's "Great Beauty in Prosperity" painting aesthetics. "Yu Da" and "Yu Da" originally came from the Book of Changes: It is said that Wang can make use of the wealth and peace of the world to make a difference. Cai Jing misinterpreted this meaning, lured Evonne to enjoy it, and built a series of palaces such as Tang Ming, Yanfu Palace, Longde Palace and Genyue to cater to Hui Zong's desire for great success. After the completion of these luxurious palaces, the room paintings and decorative walls in the hall must be in harmony with the "rich and magnificent" palace buildings: there should be magnificent screen paintings, murals and axes on the walls, realistic, refined and meticulous techniques, bright and luxurious colors and "big and complete" pictures.
Song Huizong presided over the compilation of "Xuanhe Huapu Landscape Theory", which clearly stated at the beginning that the form of "rich" landscape painting is: "Ling Chuan, Yue Zhen, has a heavy burden, but as for the beauty of nature, the beauty of Yin and Yang, and the distance of Wan Li can be obtained within a short distance", which is difficult to achieve a vertical panoramic landscape painting. The aesthetic view of "abundance" is compatible with landscape composition, that is, the framing is broad and far-reaching, continuous and unobstructed. He compiled his own imperial brush and a large number of ghostwriting works of Hanlin Painting Academy into a volume of Xuanhe Ruilan, with a total of fifteen volumes of fifteen thousand pages. These are completely consistent with the political function of painting, that is, "whitewashing the world, educating the world, making the viewer look at it, being harmonious but different", and are also the concrete embodiment of the great aesthetic view. 1 1 10 years ago, Hui Zong completed the volume "Snow River Returning to Pakistan" (Figure 7, collected by the Palace Museum), which spread the snow scene in the north horizontally. Inspired by this character, Wang Ximeng continued the continuous layout of the volume in composition, further raising his horizons and expanding his horizons.
All kinds of "prosperous Henan" construction projects, which cost people and money, accelerated the demise of the Northern Song Dynasty, but its aesthetic consciousness was that a new painting aesthetic was established in the court at the end of the Northern Song Dynasty, leaving a batch of cultural wealth. Painting landscape paintings with large turquoise is a very important artistic breakthrough of Hui Zong Dynasty. In a sense, Hui Zong "inspired" Wang Ximeng to draw the picture scroll of "A Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers" in order to boost turquoise landscape, especially to create the painting language of large turquoise landscape, so as to embody the concept of "wealth" in landscape painting and form a complete aesthetic system. It seems that Song Huizong chose Wang Ximeng to achieve this artistic breakthrough after careful consideration. Wang Ximeng has received basic training in painting, and is almost a blank sheet of paper. It is easy to understand and appreciate Hui Zong's intentions. He dared to use azurite in large quantities, which was extremely rare in the past I believe this is his harvest from observing the mountains: the lush mountains are near green and far green because the thickness of the air has changed the true colors of the distant mountains. The painter inherited the previous methods of using colors and summarized and refined the green colors.
Is the painting meaning of A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains a poem by Meng Haoran?
Hui Zong likes to paint ministers with Tang poetry propositions, and Wang Ximeng is no exception. Judging from the overall momentum and many details of "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains", Meng Haoran's five-character landscape poem "Li Peng Lake Looking at Lushan Mountain" in Tang Dynasty is the closest to the painting significance of this book.
Poyang Lake was called "Lake" in ancient times, and Meng's poem is recorded here: "There is a halo in the moon, and the boat knows the wind. Hanging seats for the morning hair, in the lake. See the middle stream, and press Jiujiang Bear. Dark and radiant, majestic and empty. At the beginning of the incense burner, the waterfall sprayed Chen Hong. For a long time, I wanted to chase after Shangzi, and I was pregnant with Yuan Gong. I am limited to service and have no time to bow. Huaihai will be half, and the frost will be poor. If you send a message to a person who lives on a rock, you should go with me. "
This was done by Meng Haoran when he was in Zhang Jiuling Shogunate in 736 and went to Yangzhou on business via Poyang Lake. The painter didn't simply interpret Meng's poems, but in the "emptiness" in the painting, he passionately showed the "majestic" bearing of "seeing the restoration in the stream and pressing Jiujiang Xiong in the potential", and also painted a picture of Poyang Ozawa with "smoke waves rippling" under the "natural wind". Alpine lakes are in sharp contrast in shape. This poem is written from the "halo of the moon" in the evening to "the dawn of the sky" and "the incense burner where the sun rises". In Meng's poems, there is such a color: "thick ink and heavy color, towering in space." The painter made great efforts for the bright "twilight color" and the warm "dawn sky". The chromatography of turquoise landscape is most suitable for dyeing "auspicious color", and cyan dyes towering peaks to show "yin" and "majestic"; Dye the sky lightly with flowers, leave white on the edge of the sky, revealing warm yellow silk color, just like dawn. The season depicted in the picture is very subtle. The morning rain is falling, the incense burner Ran Ran rises, and the rain gathers into streams, which accelerates the operation of the water mill and makes a series of waterfalls spray to Chen Hong.
The increasingly developed commercial economy in Song Dynasty accelerated the pace of people's life and formed the atmosphere of getting up early and leaving early. The people in the painting are busy in the morning, just like the poem says, "Hang up your seat and wait for tomorrow's hair." There are boats with sails, boys who sweep the court, passengers who drive and catch boats, woodcutter who goes down the mountain to collect, and package teams who travel up the mountain. The hermits who got up early showed all kinds of leisurely postures: talking in Xitang, talking in Qiaoting, sitting alone in an empty room and watching waterfalls with friends ... The poet envied the rocky life of Lushan nobles: "If you send a message to a hermit who lives in a rock, you should come with him when you are happy", and even more respected Shang Chang, a hermit in the Eastern Han Dynasty who once lived in seclusion here, and Shang Yuan, a monk in the Eastern Jin Dynasty: "I want to pursue my son early, so I am far away."
From Wang Ximeng's "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains", we can find the characteristics of court painting education in the late Northern Song Dynasty. On the one hand, we should stress "quick success and instant benefit" and "timeliness", cultivate the ability to actually operate painting tools, and improve the control level of students drawing large paintings and long scrolls to meet the needs of decorating the walls in the palace. On the other hand, it is necessary to embody the creativity, poetry and aesthetic feeling of the painter, so as to enter Hui Zong's "wealth" painting realm. After all, the book A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains is the first work of a boy of seventeen or eighteen. After him, almost no green landscape painting has reached such extraordinary tolerance and height.