Zhuang Yue庄岳

“破空而出：《避暑山庄诗》与马国贤《热河图》”（“Hatchings in the Void: Ritual and Order in Bishu Shanzhuang Shi and Matteo Ripa’s Views of Jehol”）, in Petra ten-Doesschate Chu & Ning Ding (eds), Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West, Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2015, pp. 142-157.

ISBN 978-1-60606-457-3

The Views of Jehol (1713), an album of copper-plate engravings made by the Italian missionary Matteo Ripa (1682-1746), depict Bishu Shanzhuang, the Qing Emperor Kangxi’s summer palace at Chengde. The engravings were based on the woodcut illustrations of The Emperor’s Poems on the Thirty-six Views of Bishu Shanzhuang which in turn were copied after a series of landscape paintings by Shen Yu. Though Ripa’s engravings closely follow the woodcut models they are by no means mechanical copies. In his engraving of Xiling Chenxia (Morning Glow on the Western Ridge), for example, the blankness of air and water of the Chinese version is filled with hatchings that suggest ripples in the river and clouds in the sky, while at the same time introducing an effect of spatial depth approximating European perspective.

In relation to ‘Chinese Rites Controversy’, I argue that Shen Yu's image demonstrated that the Kangxi Emperor used Confucian rituals to consolidate his ruling of the Qing Empire, and Ripa’s interpretation of Views of Jehol expressed Clement XI’s reform strategy of the Roman Catholic Church, which also used ritual practices to strengthen the Church's spiritual authority. The visual incongruences of the hatchings and the void of the two images of Xiling Chenxia may thus be interpreted to reveal the entangled political and religious relations between the Church and the Qing Court.