The Birth of 'Literati' Painting in the Song and Yuan Dynasties: How to Think About What We Do and Do Not Know

The Burdick-Vary Lecture Series: New Constructions of the Past in the Art History of China will host a talk with Jerome Silbergeld, Professor of Chinese Art History at Princeton University, on paintings in the Song and Yuan Dynasties.

Burdick-Vary Lecture Series: New Constructions of the Past in the Art History of China

Jerome Silbergeld
P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Professor of Chinese Art History, Princeton University

'The Birth of 'Literati' Painting in the Song and Yuan Dynasties: How to Think About What We Do and Do Not Know'

Every study of later Chinese painting history tends to establish two overarching categories into which all paintings are expected to fit: literati and not literati, the latter including court, ecclesiastical, and popular works. All modern viewers are charged with comprehending how this rubric of "literati painting," peculiar to China and tied to its civil service system, accounts for style. Yet the birth of literati painting has confused historians, for in its first few hundred years it exhibited a highly unstable visual identity that must prove baffling to anyone today expecting to see there a clear-cut differential between it and not-it. Why this confusion, and how should we deal with this uncertainty about such a fundamental historical issue?