The Aesthetic Of Traditional History Painting

Past Chinese paintings are precious cultural heritages, and history painting is one of them. It is different from scenery, flower and birds, and subjects like ladies, portraits or cultures in painting of figures. History paintings focused on real historical persons in specific temporal or spatial settings, historical events or certain social phenomena. They have become witnesses of history and rare graphical historical documents. History paintings usually had the functions "to form education, to help interpersonal relationships, to make the most variations and to present the details". This was also the reason why the rulers needed history paintings. In comparison to other past paintings, the history paintings had the uniqueness of creation. Form the creative aspect, history paintings can be considered a special category, and this can be an independent subject of research in terms of art history. There are a huge number of history paintings in the old Chinese art history. With respect to the creations of the traditional history paintings, they are mentioned and discussed in many traditional painting theories. However, in the traditional theories in all the eras, history paints were never put in a category. They were merely generally considered a part of the paintings of figures. In the academic angle, history paintings and figure paints usually had differences in terms of matters of academic discussions. This has brought the challenges to read and to cope with history paintings. This article tries to systematically and thoroughly induce history painting and to research its appreciation of beauty in certain ways.