A Study On The Relationship Between The Bird-and-Flower Paintings And Poems In Northern Song

It has been a long process of evolution for Chinese paintings and Chinese poems to ceaselessly learn from each other,complement each other and eventually incorporate each other to form an integral whole.The Northern Song dynasty has certainly been the crucial period for such relation to develop.In this paper,the flower-and-bird paintings of Northern Song are analyzed in terms of the Southern School style(often known as the Literati paintings)and the Northern School style(often called the Yuanti paintings),by applying the theories of that time about the painting-poem relation,in order to look into the details of the close relation between the flower-and-bird paintings and the poems in Northern Song and thus to probe deep into what achievements critical to this relation were ever made in this dynasty.In the first chapter,the relation between paintings and poems is briefly explained.This chapter consists of two parts.The first part is dedicated to the study and the discussion about the connotations of this painting-poem relation:these include on one hand how the three aspects of beauty,landscapes,colors and images,in a poem make this poem a "painting without paint" and on the other hand,how the poetic characteristics contained in the conception and the landscape of a painting make this painting "a painted poem".Based on this analysis,this part continues to explain how possible paintings and poems can be combined because of the coherence nature and the mutual complement nature of this relation between these two forms of art.The second part investigates the process of paintings and poems being combined,taking Northern Song as the milestone to analyze how this relation took shape and evolved differently before and after the start of the Norther Song dynasty.The second chapter is important,in which is discussed the relation between the poems and the flower-and-bird paintings of the Yuanti School(the Northern School)of Northern Song,concerning many representative figures of this School such as HUANG Quan and his sons,ZHAO Chang,CUI Bai and ZHAO Ji,the Emperor Huizong of Northern Song,along with the paintings of these people evolving from possessing only a poetic touch to completely combining with poems.Three approaches were ever used to accomplish this combination:applying the Confucian idealist philosophy on the conception of a painting to build poetic settings,exchanging with the Literati School to develop poetic sentiments,and setting poetic topics for the examinations that were organized to qualify painters.In the end of this chapter,ZHAO Ji,the Emperor Huizong,is taken as the subject of the analysis,in which the combination of paintings and poems in his paintings is closely investigated,with regard to the painting style of "Xuanhe",the proposals about paintings of the "Huaxue Academy" and the aesthetic standards used in the "Xuanhe Painting Copybook",so as to eventually understand the artistic theories and the opinions about the poem-and-painting combination of this Emperor Huizong.The third chapter is also an important one,discussing the relation between the poems and the flower-and-bird paintings of the Liberati School(the Southern School)of Northern Song.This chapter consists of three parts.The first part presents the general picture of the theories of the Liberati School of Northern Song about the painting-poem relation.This School argued that a painter should,in his or her paintings,give priority to catching the spirit of the objects to be painted and expressing one's own mood(this style is shortly called the freehand painting in this paper),instead of focusing on the meticulous shapes of those objects.As the result of this argument,this School pursued the "natural" and "fresh and chaste"painting style and eventually advanced the theory about combining poems and paintings.In the second part,the poems of the Literati School written on the flower-and-bird paintings and the freehand flower-and-bird paintings of the same School are separately discussed.The poems written in the paintings represent the combination of poems and paintings to the form level while the freehand paintings to the spiritual level.The third part takes SU Shi as example to analyze his poems and paintings in details in order to illustrate his artistic thought known as " poems and paintings share common aesthetic standards" from the following three perceptions:the natural,fresh and chaste style,the aim at expressing his attitudes and the spirit of the painted objects,and the landscapes with poetic beauty.The fourth chapter is dedicated to the study on the influence that the established poem-painting relation in the flower-and-bird paintings of Northern Song has had upon paintings of later ages.Having progressed from the appearance of the theory about the common aesthetic standards shared by poems and paintings to the creation of the first painting that combined with poems,this poem-painting combination exerted an immense influence upon the Literati paintings,becoming the main characteristic of the Literati paintings and changing the painting circles of the Yuan,the Ming and the Qing dynasties.The paintings increasingly combined with poems have shaped up the artistic characteristic of the Northern Song flower-and-bird paintings,in which painters' attitudes and the spirit of the objects being painted are emphasized.This characteristic has had significant influences not only on the evolution of the flower-and-bird paintings of later times but also on the conception of the modern flower-and-bird paintings.