A Study Of Illustrations In The Ming Edition Of "Yu Shi Ren Feng"

In the late Ming Dynasty,woodcut prints flourished,and woodcut prints developed to unprecedented heights during the Wanli period.After the Yongle period,the royal engraving was mainly presided over by the Directorate of Ceremonial(Silijian).In 1620,Jin Zhong,the eunuch who guarded Fengyang,Anhui,completed the compilation of Yushi Renfeng and organized the publication.The book is well illustrated and beautifully engraved,but the place of the print and the person of the painting are unknown.In addition,previous researches mostly focused on the background of the book's compilation,and rarely involved images.The first chapter is about related issues such as the author and the place of publication.It also gives a brief introduction to the book's version,format and contents,in order to follow up the study.The second chapter is the analysis of the illustration,sorting out the overall composition of the illustration.Through a detailed study of the portrayal of the characters and the environmental background,and a comparison of similar scenes with other prints,the unique painting language of this book is summed up.The third chapter summarizes the image schema,and infers the painter of the illustration through the source of the typical figure "under the tree".The fourth chapter discusses the content behind the image,such as visual metaphor and space-time view.The combination of space and concrete objects in the image contains profound metaphors,so we can observe Jin Zhong's ideological tendency.The different spatial and temporal expressions of single scene and multi-scene images embody the time and space view of ancient Chinese narrative painting.