A Study On The Literariness Of Intellectual Paintings In The Song Dynasty

Taking the literariness of the intellectual paintings in the Song dynasty as its subject, this research examines the background and representative painters of the Song intellectual paintings, the realization of literariness in these paintings, and the causes for the prominent literariness in the Song intellectual paintings. It also provides a systematic analysis of the unique combination of literary techniques and the painting art in the Song intellectual paintings.The Song intellectual paintings demonstrate some distinguishing features from the intellectual paintings of the previous dynasties. Take Su Shi, Li Gonglin, Mi Fu and his son for example, their paintings clearly shows personal pursuit of perfectness, the stylistic emphasis of simplicity, and the skillful incorporation of spirituality. Since the painters of the intellectual paintings are mainly from the literati, they were able to incorporate literary rhetoric techniques into their artistic creation. By recourse to such techniques analogy and exaggeration, they endow the abstract literary thoughts with concrete artistic images, expressing their personality, emotions, and pursuits. Apart from benefiting from the economic prosperity of the time, the prominent literariness in the Song intellectual paintings is also indebted to the "cultural admiration" fashion of the time, In the Song dynasty, cultural admiration was not only a government policy, it is also a social phenomenon. The development and prosperity of literary and artistic trends in the Song dynasty have greatly facilitated the interaction between literature and painting in the creative activities of the intellectuals. The steady improvement of the status of the literati and their special way of thinking have similarly given rise to the development of the other cultural domains, the improvement of the overall cultural qualifications and appreciation capacity of the society.The thorough literary quality, the personal pursuit of perfectness, the simplistic style of painting, and the creation of the profound conception have all added to the artistic value of the intellectual paintings. The emphasis on the spiritual similarity and skillful use of inks, and the incorporation of poetry into paintings are the typical artistic features of the Song intellectual paintings. Deriving its vitality from the poetic traditions of previous dynasties, the lyric poetry reached a new peak in the Chinese literary history, exerting influences on diverse artistic fields such as calligraphy, painting and music. For example, the lyric poetry furnishes the elite painters with abundant materials on which to base their paintings. They are good at create pictures to represent the verbal paintings of the poems, endeavoring to achieve the effect of picture in poem and poem in picture. The creative conception in the intellectual paintings is the most straightforward presentation of literariness. The Song intellectual paintings is exempt from the restrictions of images and features creative use of inks; the resultant pictures are poetic, artistic and romantic. In Southern Song dynasty, much of the paintings were deliberately left blank so that poems, stamps could be incorporated, creating a blended artistic effect.Incorporating knowledge from such diverse fields as literature, fine arts, historiography and sociology, and employing various research instruments such as photography, documents, deduction, and comparative studies, this paper has examined in-depth the literariness of the Song intellectual paintings from more than one perspective. Based on relevant pictures and textual materials, it also carried out some targeted theoretical research, making some tentative investigation and evaluation on the value and significance of the Song intellectual paintings.