Illustrations of the Life of Confucius: Their Evolution, Functions, and Significance in Late Ming China

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Artibus Asiae Publishers is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Artibus Asiae. The late Ming period saw the appearance of numerous pictorial biographies or hagiographies of Confucius (ca. 551-479 B.C.), the great Eastern Zhou philosopher and teacher. Many sets of annotated pictures, usually bearing some form of the title Shengji tu (Pictures of the Sage's Traces), were created to portray a comprehensive series of events and anecdotes associated with Confucius's life, arranged in roughly chronological order. Illustrations of the subject were far more common in printed or carved media than in painting, and the majority of examples were woodblock prints bound into books. The few painted illustrations that survive were based on printed models, contrary to the dominant direction of influence between the two media. As the theme evolved during the middle and late Ming period (late ISth-mid 17th centuries), the number of biographical episodes illustrated steadily increased, from between twenty-nine and thirty-four in the earliest set (1444) to one hundred twelve in the largest (1592), and the sequence of events also varied. The additions and reorderings reflect shifts in official and popular conceptions of Confucius and in the treatment of his cult, as well as the adaptability of his image as a symbol in periods of political turbulence and socio-economic change. Prefaces and colophons offer some insight into the circumstances in which new sets of pictures were created and suggest the purposes that they were intended to serve.In this article, I will examine the origins and iconography of illustrated accounts of Confucius's life and investigate the relationships between different sets of pictures. Besides tracing illustrated episodes to textual sources, I will examine the influence of other pictures (including illustrated lives of other heroic individuals) on the conceptualization of the pictorial biography of Confucius. In the main section of the article, I will reconstruct the significant stages in the evolution of the Shengji tu theme in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, exploring at the same time the functions and significance of the illustrated biographies within a broader historical context. Finally, I will briefly examine the relationship between paintings on the theme of Shengji tu and the far more numerous printed editions and versions carved on stone tablets. THE CULT OF CONFUCIUS AND ITS USE OF ICONSThe teachings of Confucius have wielded enormous influence on Chinese culture and statecraft for well over two thousand years, continuing even to the present. Although Confucius had been unable to influence the conduct of feudal rulers of hi...

A Confucian Education for Europeans

“…In this format, the Shengji tu chronicled Confucius's story from the miraculous signs that preceded and followed his birth to his precocious ritual activities, his adult struggles to educate rulers and bolster the ritual system, his encounters with misfortunes, his upright moral character, and eventually his death and posthumous cult. 49 The Abrégé historique follows this structure but shortens and reinterprets the story to suit a European audience. The book begins with a frontal seated portrait of the philosopher that comes not from the Shengji tu, but from the Queli zhi (Records of Queli, 1505), an illustrated ritual text by the Ming author Chen Hao (jinshi 1487), mentioned in Father Amiot's letter (Figs.…”

Publishing, Society and Culture in Pre-Modern China: The Evolution of Print Culture

“…See, for example : Rawski 1979;Hayes 1980Hayes , 1983Hayes , 1985 25 On the artistic aspects of book production, see Mote and Chu 1989. Most of the scholarship in this area is devoted, however, to the study of woodblock prints and their role in text illustration: Murray 1993Murray , 1996Murray , 1997Farrer 1984;and Bussotti 2001. At a more theoretical level, Craig Clunas, in a variety of writings (most notably, Clunas 1997), has reflected on the status of woodblock prints as "reproduceable" objects in the art world of the late Ming.…”