纽约时报刊登知名艺术批评家苏伦•麦理肯(Souren Melikian)的一篇题为“奇怪的故事:中国皇帝的法国版画”(The Strange Tale of a Chinese Emperor’s French Prints)的文章。文章说,这场耗民伤财的战争毫无经济或者文化动机而非打不可。远古时期,这片土地居住著被称为索格底人(Sogdians)的伊朗民族,通过遗留下来的物品和纺织品的证据判断,他们早在公元7世纪就定居于此。维吾尔人随著土耳其语系民族的西迁运动的扩展,慢慢地渗入此地,一两个世纪后,他们就在之后的1,100年里把这里当作了他们的家乡。(chinesenewsnet.com)
当时,实际的完成量比乾隆下令刻制的多出来了一些。于1774年登基的路易十六国王在他位于凡尔赛的私人住所中挂有一幅。其他的都被分给手下大臣们。埃德蒙•德•罗斯柴尔德男爵(Baron Edmond de Rothschild)曾于20世纪取得一幅,并于1935年捐给了卢浮宫。(chinesenewsnet.com)
The Strange Tale of a Chinese Emperor’s French Prints
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Published: March 27, 2009
Of all the East-West encounters, few are as strange as the story at the heart of the Louvre show of 44 French 18th-century prints on view until May 18, under the title “The Chinese Emperor’s Battles: When the Qianlong Emperor Sent His Requests for Prints to Louis XV.”
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Musée du Louvre/Martine Beck-Coppola
Works from a collection of Emperor Qianlong's prints include an etching reworked with burin by Jean-Denis Attire.
From 1755 to 1759, the army sent by Emperor Qianlong (1735-1796) fought a tough war to conquer Mongol lands and, further west, the vast territories of the Uighurs in Turkistan, now called Xinjiang. Executed at the behest of the emperor, the prints offer an idealized vision of a considerably harsher reality.
There was no compelling economic or cultural reason for this taxing undertaking. In ancient times, the area was inhabited by a northeast Iranian people, the Sogdians, whose presence is established through material and textual evidence down to the seventh century A.D. The Uighurs, caught up in the westward movement of Turkic-speaking groups, gradually penetrated the area and within a couple of centuries made it their homeland for the next 1,100 years.
Adhering to Buddhism and occasionally to Christianity, the Uighurs were slowly won over to Islam by the missionaries who arrived from the Persian-speaking cities of Central Asia. None of this made their land a particularly obvious target for China.
Was the desire to repeat history an incentive? At the height of its maximum extension around the first or second century A.D., the Chinese empire ruled by the Han dynasty nominally controlled the area. Many centuries later, the Mongols overran Uighur lands in the course of their conquests, which embraced territories stretching from the borders of present-day Poland in the west to the Pacific shores of China and included the Middle East. But the great Song dynasty, under which Chinese culture rose to an apex around the 11th or 12th century, showed no interest in such undertakings. Neither did the Ming, who re-established Chinese unity after defeating the Mongol dynasty, who ruled China from 1279 to 1368.
So what drove the emperor of such an immense country as China to launch his armies across unforgiving deserts into lands where the material surroundings and the living culture bore no connection to his domain? And how on earth did the emperor of China come to commission French artists to make prints reproducing 16 paintings, also by Western artists, as a way of commemorating these conquests?
The Chinese imperial decree ordering the prints survives only in the French translation established in July 1765, which begins: “I want 16 sketches of the victorious battles won by me during the conquest of the Kingdom of Djungar and the surrounding Muslim countries that were depicted by Lang-Shi Ning,” the Chinese name adopted by the Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione, “and the other European painters in my service to be dispatched to Europe where the best craftsmen will be selected to engrave them on brass plates.” Four sketches were to be sent forthwith and 100 impressions of each were first to be printed and sent to China together with the brass plates. The next 12 sketches would follow in separate batches.
Things did not go quite so smoothly. The Louvre curator in charge of the show, Pascal Torres, recounts in the exhibition book how the first batch — which left Canton, in Guangdong Province, on Jan. 21, 1766, and arrived in Paris with the text of the imperial edict on Aug. 10 — was held up by the East India Company until Dec. 17.
Mr. Torres speculates that the company dreaded the consequences of the emperor’s displeasure, should anything go amiss in the execution of the job. Word had reached the company managers that the decision to send the sketches to France had been made not by the emperor, but by subordinates in Guangdong. It was vital to get it right.
Work began in 1767 and lasted until 1774. Directed by the engraver Charles-Nicolas Cochin, the best masters of the genre executed etchings, and also made prints from the same brass plates reworked with a burin in order to achieve clearer outlines and greater contrast.
A very few extra sets were printed on top of those ordered by Qianlong. King Louis XVI, who mounted the throne in 1774, had one in his private quarters at Versailles. Others were given to ministers. One was acquired in the 20th century by Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who donated it to the Louvre in 1935.
As art, the prints amount to little more than anticipations of the kind of illustrations printed in late 19th-century children’s books. As an enigma of cultural history (altogether ignored in the exhibition book), you can’t beat them.
The sets bear no connection to Chinese art. Qianlong wrote poems about his victories, but these do not appear in the images as Chinese tradition would have it. Mr. Torres sees in the imperial commission an act of political “propaganda.” But aimed at whom? To be effective, propaganda images must deliver an instant punch. They should not look unfamiliar, let alone alien, as these French prints were bound to be perceived by the Far Eastern public, particularly the literati steeped in classical Chinese art and culture. Yet the print runs of the French impressions did not exceed 200.
The inevitable conclusion seems to be that the sets were commissioned for the private satisfaction of the emperor, presumably keen to remind his immediate entourage of his splendid achievements.
But why European prints? Granting that later Chinese editions of the sets included Chinese text (incomprehensibly, none are in the show), they remained stylistically far removed from the art that the Chinese might be expected to respond to with any measure of spontaneity.
This raises the broader issue of the wave of Westernizing fashion that engulfed the visual arts under Qianlong. True, under his predecessor, a distinct strain of European influence already made itself felt. Awareness of European-style perspective is perceptible in some 17th-century paintings. Porcelain shapes reproduce some European silver models and Western motifs creep into the decoration.
But the trickle of European influence became torrential under Qianlong. This explains why Jesuit missionaries from Portugal, Italy and France were welcomed. The most famous among them, the Milan-born Castiglione, arrived in Beijing at age 27, with the Portuguese mission. Having mastered not only the Chinese language, but also calligraphy and scroll painting, Castiglione became painter to the emperor and died in Beijing in 1766. Other Jesuits, like Jean-Denis Attiret, alias Wang Zhi Cheng, followed a similar course. These were the authors of the paintings celebrating Qianlong’s conquests in a Beijing palace, of which sketches were sent to be engraved in France.
The Westernizing fashion peaked in China with the construction of the Yuanmingyuan Palace, directed by the Jesuits, who drew their inspiration from Versailles while introducing fanciful Chinese details. Ironically, this piece of Western Chinoiserie for the Chinese — now known only through prints — was destroyed by the Anglo-French soldiery during the 1860 sack of Beijing. The outrage continues to reverberate each time one of the bronze animal figures believed to have been looted from the palace turns up at auction.
The havoc wrought on Chinese art by the Westernizing trend is aptly, if unintentionally, illustrated in the show by a Qianlong period vase, attempting to reproduce a French shape. Western-inspired floral motifs are molded under the celadon glaze. This is kitsch of the worst kind, enhanced by French ormolu fittings complete with a smiling mermaid — the vase once belonged to Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV.
How the massive intrusion into China, not just of foreign motifs but of aesthetics fundamentally alien to her art, came to pass has never been seriously discussed.
One factor seems obvious. While born in China, Qianlong was not Chinese. A scion of the dynasty founded in the mid-17th century by the Manchu invaders, the emperor spoke Manchu to his close relatives, dressed like a Manchu and had the tastes of a Manchu prince, hunting included. Even though he was thoroughly at home in Chinese letters to the point of composing impeccable poems and producing passable calligraphy, Qianlong was a traveler through cultures. As an outsider, he looked at them and their conflicting art forms with equal curiosity.
The emperor’s foreign roots might even account for his conquering endeavor in Turkistan. Invading foreign lands is alien to the authentic Chinese tradition, molded by Confucianism, which does not hold the military in high esteem.
Ancient rivalries in the steppes and a taste for physical triumph inherited from his nomadic ancestry were perhaps the motivations behind Qianlong’s strange expedition that made so little political sense.