The Jesuit Perspective in China

By the end of the sixteenth century, Renaissance perspective had become established in the West as the most realistic system of representation. Having lost all symbolic significance, it had become a convention in artistic practice and had begun to be studied with a sort of antiquarian fascination by mathematicians.

Studies by Simon Stevin, Guidohaldo del Monte, François d'Aguilon, Girard Desargues, and Jean Dubreuil contributed to its definitive codification as an analytical-geometrical method, with Jean-Victor Poncelet's projective geometry completing the process at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Just as linear perspective reached the apex of its acceptance as a convention, Jesuit missionaries exported it to China as a vehicle of Christian iconography. Matteo Ricci, the founder of the China mission in 1583, brought late sixteenth-century European perspective oil paintings with him. It was the first time that Western anthropocentric representations had appeared on the boundless horizon of Chinese art.

Chinese Painting

Chinese painting used a consolidated method of oblique parallel projection and was organized into precise genres, obeying rigid descriptive rules. Balletic calligraphy and evanescent watercolor effects reiterated the philosophical and lyrical character of art. The representation was not a transcription of direct observation of the real but of what the inner eye was capable of grasping.

The use of parallel orthogonal perspective abolished the primacy of the viewpoint and there were no depth cues, such as vanishing points or converging lines, only the contrivances of aerial perspective shrouding distances in mysterious vapors.

This technique of painting struck the Jesuits as weak, while the Chinese found Western paintings to be "violent" and "devoid of any artistry." Ricci wrote that the Chinese did not know how to paint in oils, nor did they shade their paintings, resulting in dull and lifeless art.

Ricci's Mission

After twenty years of petitioning, Ricci was finally admitted to the presence of the Emperor and presented him with three oil paintings. The Emperor exclaimed, "This is the living God," and venerated the image with incense and perfumes. However, he was so perturbed by the appearance of these gifts that he kept only the painting of Baby Jesus, dispatching the other two to the Emperor Mother, who deposited them in the imperial treasury.

During his long wait for admittance to the capital city, Ricci witnessed the extraordinary reaction of the Chinese to strongly shadowed perspectival representation. Painting played an important role in the subtle and complex workings of the Jesuit missionary strategy, along with lenses, robots, hydraulic machines, and astronomical knowledge. Captatio benevolentiae comprised not only behaving humbly and respectfully toward the culture and language of the host people but also the skillful intertwining of faith and wonderment.

Contradiction

The religious images appeared to the Emperor's eyes solely as technical marvels and were accorded an almost religious respect. The evangelical message was ignored since the manner of representation was not realistic for the Chinese.

To make those images more convincing and theologically more effective, it was necessary to familiarize the Chinese with the rules that governed perspective. Thus, alongside an obstinate and often futile evangelical activity, the Jesuits also embarked upon a program of scientific acculturation.

Translation of Euclid

In 1606, Ricci had his pupil Xu Guangqi translate the first six books of Euclid's Elements, an indispensable premise for perspectival construction. The translation "was a very wondrous thing, showing with great clarity a manner of proof and demonstration, the like of which has never again been seen." Euclidean geometry was a complete novelty for Chinese culture.

Although deductive reasoning comparable to that of the Greeks may be found in the ancient Mohist Canons of the fourth century BC, the geometrical cognitions of the Chinese, from the Han Period onward, were limited to practical formulae for the approximate calculation of surfaces and volumes. As far as optics was concerned, the theory of the emission of visual rays has always been extraneous to Chinese theory. Euclid's error, which had permitted the formulation of Western perspective, was thus not known in China.

Even the definition of plane, already present in the Mohist Canons, carried no optical or geometrical implications, since a plane is a surface that never reaches its sides.

Given the Chinese disinclination for generalist laws and theorizing, tangible demonstrations were necessary to convince them that perspective was the right way to see and represent: in short, the right way to think. Sight and thought had to converge in harmony toward that magical point where the parallel lines met and where the Western painting tradition placed the image and the idea of the divine infinite.

Later Efforts

Nineteen years after Ricci's death, the Jesuit Francesco Sambiaso published a book on perspective titled Risposte alle questioni sul sonno e sulla pittura (Replies to questions on sleep and on painting), and later Father Buglio presented the Emperor with three paintings that exemplified the rules of perspective.

The astronomer Father Ferdinand Verbiest, who had been elevated to the grade of Mandarin and who was the director of the Astronomical Tribunal of Beijing, wrote: "Perspectiva lucidissimus suis oculis prima omnium oculos Imperatoris in se convertit … . Vix credi potest quantum haec ars omnium rapuit oculos non solum pekinensium."

Limited Success

European astronomy was accepted by the Chinese for practical reasons as the best method for ordering those rites that objectified their relationship with the heavens, the Emperor, and his subjects. However, the same did not happen with painting. Perspective was certainly "marvelous," but that did not make it better than traditional methods of painting, and the Chinese understood that its seduction concealed a "conversion" that had not been asked for and that conflicted with the attributes of the Emperor, who was both mother and father of his subjects.

Resistance to perspective was very tenacious, and even those painters who had converted to Christianity remained substantially bound to traditional Chinese painting. The attempts to acquaint the Chinese with the rules of perspective continued. In 1729, the greatest painter who worked in China, Giuseppe Castiglione, arranged for the translation and publication of the fundamental work of his teacher Andrea Pozzo. Though this attempt was met with little success, Castiglione was, along with Verbiest, one of the seven Jesuits elevated to the status of Mandarin between 1581 and 1681, and therefore he played a role of some prestige at the imperial court.

In the end, it was the rigidity of the Confucian China of the Mandarins and literati, seduced by science and by the dignity of Ricci's life at the end of the Ming Dynasty, as well as by Castiglione afterward, that managed to colonize the colonialists.

Adaptation by the Jesuits

In his History of Wordless Poetry, Jiang Shaoshu writes about Matteo Ricci bringing an image of the Lord of the Heavens according to the Western countries, depicting a woman carrying a child. The figures were admired for their majesty and elegance, surpassing the abilities of Chinese painters. However, the Chinese admiration was primarily for the technical aspects, with indifference to the religious significance.

To address this contradiction, Jesuit policy shifted towards adapting to Chinese methods of representation. Emulating the approach of being