Castiglione Painting Style And Genetic Research

Born in Milan, Italy, Giuseppe Castiglione came to China as a missionary. He had worked in China for more than 50 years, from Emperor Kangxi's reign to Emperor Qianlong's reign. He is known as one of the heralds in the history of East-West cultural and artistic exchanges. Castiglione had solid painting skills before went to China. In order to meet emperors' aesthetic taste, Castiglione learnt to use Chinese painting tools and reform his painting style by referring to Chinese painting skills and picture composition means. Thus, he created a lot of new-style paintings, including paintings of flowers, birds and animals, portraits and history-recording paintings. His paintings are very delicate and colourful with a particular style, which is a combination of Chinese and Western styles. This thesis is based on two clues, one is the change of the style in Castiglione's paintings according to time, and the other is the course of Catholic missionizing in China. The thesis tries to discuss and answer four questions: 1. What style do Castiglione's paintings represent? 2. Why did Castiglione create this style? 3. How should we appraise Castiglione and his paintings? For the first two questions, the author tries to present her own viewpoints based on the previous studies of other researchers. The thesis focuses on the third question, tries to find out the inner and outer causes of the development of the new-style painting from diverse perspectives. Finally, by comparing different viewpoints, the author presents her proposals on how to appraise Castiglione and his paintings.