A Comparative Study Of The Portraits Of The Emperor And Empress Of The Yuan And Qing Dynasties

As one kind of portraits,the portrait of emperors and empress implies the spirit of Confucian system and divine rights and is endowed with the function of educating and ethics developing,which contributes to the significance of it among rulers.In the Yuan dynasty,it's Mongolian who rules the society.Due to the deep influence of Tibetan Buddhism,except for “painting emperor portrait”,a new way called “weaving emperor portrait” is adopted in a great number of works of emperor and empress portraits.Those portraits which made of kesi instead of painting suggest the unique Mongolian characteristic in Yuan dynasty.The fact of that Qing is a dynasty ruled over by minority leads to the tendency to inherit the traditional features of pattern,clothing adornment and aesthetic taste from the Song and Ming dynasties,which can be directly reflected in the emperor portraits of Nurhaci,Taizong and Sizu Emperor.Western missionaries bring the techniques and forms of western portrait to China and create a sino-western style by combining with Chinese traditional emperor painting.That the development of culture and art of the Yuan and the Qing dynasties is slower than that of Han ethnic since after their domination of the area of middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River.Although the rulers accept Han culture,they keep their own cultures as well.On the basis of collecting numerous data of different emperor portraits of the Yuan and Qing dynasties,making comparison of creative techniques,materials,topics,clothing etc.before analyzing and elaborating.From the contrastive study of emperor and empress in the Yuan and the Qing dynasties,we could notice that the awareness of rights,collective concept,and cultural ideology are the factors effecting representational art.For Han nationality,the Yuan and the Qing are two dynasties dominated by the interracial,which is the common point between Yuan and Qing emperor portraits.While the differences in their own portraits suggest that there are gaps on the degree of converting into Han style: Yuan keeps more religion elements and cultural traditions of their own,but Qing adopts Han culture more in the cultural art.