Silk Painting in Qin and Han Dynasties
3 min readBrick Relief
Another unique representative of fine art in Han dynasty was brick relief. To produce a brick relief first one need to put earth base into a wood mold and make it into brick base; when it is half dried, remove the wood mold and press moulage onto the surface of the brick base to make all kinds of images. The bricks used in brick relief were either solid or hollow ones, and the latter were larger. As a kind of construction component, brick relief was first appeared in late Warring States period. It prevailed in Han dynasty and gained its highest achievement in the Three Kingdom, the Wei and Jin period more than two thousand years ago.
The subject matter of brick relief in Han dynasty is closely related to the social life and customs, for example, farming, harvesting, fishing, hunting, and mulberry leaf picking, well salting, trading, brewing and rice pestle, which reveal the economic activities at that time. And the theme of riding, architecture, cooking and banquet, dancing and drama, respecting the senior, giving lectures reveal the tomb owner’s life and social status when he was alive. Other subjects like dredging Ding (ancient cooking vessel) from Sishui River, Jin Ke assassinating Emperor Qinshihuang, dog biting Zhao Dun God of fishery and husbandry Fuxi and Goddess Ntiwa, Fairy King(who reigns over all male genii), Queen of the Western Heaven feather man riding dragon, flying fairy, deva-musician are all from histories, myth, legend and Buddhist fine art. Besides, the images of animals and plants and other geometrical devices were often seen in sculpting art of that time.
The sculpting techniques of brick relief include line carving and relief. The previous one includes negative line carving and positive line carving. The images carved are typical and vivid, and lines simple and clear. The latter one includes bass-relief and high relief. Bass-relief is full of changes with the combination of many lines and surfaces. High relief is more impressive with its bulk. Brick relief do not pursue detailed depiction or close resemblance of images, but attach great importance to alikeness in spirit and authentic images. The style is massy and great, vigorous and imposing. They obviously revealed the artistic characteristics of the era.
There are large number of brick reliefs unearthed in China, with the most excellent ones from Henan and Sichuan provinces.
Silk Painting
Silk painting mainly refers to the picture painted on thin silk which served as banner in funerals. The banner is used to cover the coffin when taken into tombs.
There are silk paintings found in No.1 and No.3 Mawangdui Han tomb in Changsha, capital of Hunan province, as well as in No.9 Han tomb in Mt. Jinqueshan, Linyi in Shandong province.
The banner of silk painting is usually 2 meters long, the same length of coffin.
The two silk paintings unearthed in Mawangdui Han tomb are wider in the upper part and in a “T”shape. The one in Mt. Jinqueshan Han tomb is in a rectangle shape with the same width in its upper and lower part. On those banners there are exquisite colorful pictures, which are all valuable artworks and significant to the research of ancient funeral system, myth, legend and religious thoughts.
The subjects of silk painting include three parts represent the heaven, the world and the hell respectively. The heaven part includes images like the sun, the moon, and stars, flying dragon, god with snake body. In the sun one can see golden crow, and in the moon toad and white rabbit as well as Goddess of the moon Chang’e.
The world part depicts the tomb owner’s daily life including scenes of traveling, banquet, sacrifice, living, music and dancing, meeting guests and so on. The hell part depicts monsters and dragon, snake, big fish and other aquatic animals, whichrepresent the “water official residence”under the sea, the so called”Acheron”or “the nether world”. The theme of the whole silk painting is to soothe the dead, generally known as “bringing the spirit to the heaven”, though some understand it as “evocation as to resume spirit”.
