A well-known Sinologist and Professor Bao Huashi of the University of Michigan once said that things in the Song Dynasty seem to happen around us; things in the Tang Dynasty are farther away from the present, and they really happened in ancient times, so, The Song Dynasty can be regarded as the source of the contemporary nature of Chinese society.

　　Last year, a scholar nearby said after visiting the exhibition at Masakurain in Japan, he said that things from the Tang Dynasty were brought together and brought a bit of originality, which was completely different from the things of the Song people. This is somewhat similar to the "Song Dynasty doctrine" once advocated by Japanese scholars. The so-called Song Dynasty doctrine refers to the aesthetics of the Song Dynasty in terms of culture and art.

　　The Song cultural relics we see today are mostly calligraphy, paintings, and utensils. It is impossible to see a royal palace and a complete court aesthetic like the Ming and Qing Dynasties. As a person who loves the art of the Song Dynasty, in the past, I could only rely on a famous painting tube like "The Qingming River" to see the leopard. The current hit drama "Qing Ping Le" seems to give us a big surprise in restoring the living environment of the Song people.

Know a little more

　　The ubiquitous landscape elements in "Qing Ping Le" echoed people's aesthetic preferences at that time. At the end of the Five Dynasties, famous masters of landscape painting came out in abundance, and landscape really separated from the background of figure painting and became an independent painting subject. As far as the Northern Song Dynasty, landscape paintings were more respected among scholars and scholars. Fan Kuan's "Xi Mountain Traveling Tour Map" currently in the Taipei Palace Museum is a masterpiece of the landscape paintings of the Northern Song Dynasty.

　　It is understood that in the Song paintings around the world, there are more than 400 pieces in the Palace Museum in Beijing, accounting for about a quarter. Now you can get a glimpse of the "Digital Relic Library" on its official website.

1

Excessive magnification of ancient paintings will be out of shape

　　An important carrier of Song Dynasty aesthetics is calligraphy and painting.

　　In the second episode of the play, the young Renzong visited Yan Shu's house. A screen behind Yan Shu was quite eye-catching. It is not difficult to see that it came from the "Southwest Song Dynasty" Zhao Fu "Jiangshan Wanli Tu" collected by the Palace Museum. When the scenes in the play frequently appear in the Song paintings that are now deeply hidden in major museums, the living environment of the Song people is particularly worthy of "cultural supplement".

　　In the process of using Song paintings, Qing Ping Le is devoted as much effort as possible, finding a large number of Song paintings to make various screens and murals, letting us see a scene full of Song Dynasty art in a living environment, which is in addition to the museum The scene that is difficult to reproduce outside reproduces the glorious art in history.

　　However, many real works of Song paintings in the play are enlarged and used slightly distorted. Take the background image of the poster of the male lead Song Renzong, it comes from the "Picture of Qingluan Xiaosi" collected by the famous Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in the United States. It is the work of the Song Dynasty painter Li Cheng. The original painting was only 1.14 Meters high and 56 centimeters wide, but enlarged to 2.5 meters or even wider in the play. Enlarged in this way, some details in the original work become less beautiful. This may be a place that TV viewers may not feel, but people who are familiar with art history are thrilled, because the details will become weak after the enlargement, and the charm will become Aliasing. The Song people know exactly how to adopt a standard expression method when making large paintings, and it is under this restricted premise that the painter formed the skills and ideas that have been circulating for thousands of years. If you can directly use the more than 100 pieces of Song paintings that have been handed down for a long time, and control them within 20%, the visual effect will be better.

　　Of course, it is also popular nowadays that the TV drama producer, in fact, is the eyes of the audience to decide how to use traditional painting. In 2013, the UC Berkeley Museum's "Red Makeup and Liying" exhibition, the theme was a group of unprecedented paintings of ladies in the Yongzheng period of the Qing Dynasty, but the dominant poster on the exhibition is almost the worst quality of the exhibits. One thing, because the students' votes are most concerned about it, the exhibition side listened to the opinions of the audience.

　　Since it became popular in the Forbidden City Exhibition in 2017, the costume drama has a preference for Wang Ximeng's "A Thousand Miles of Mountains and Mountains". It seems that with it, it can be named "Song Dynasty Aesthetics", regardless of whether its painters live in the Renzong After the Huizong period of sixty or seventy years.

　　I have to admit that in the process of the spread of Song painting, there is a lot of information missing. This is especially true for every painter. For example, the poster background of the Empress of "Qing Ping Le" comes from Guo Xi's "Early Spring". There are only a few authentic pieces of Guo Xi handed down, and some marginal style works are difficult to judge whether they are painted by Guo Xi's authentic pieces or painters close to their style. Because of the lack of collection data, this problem may never be solved. What is even more headache is that this is a common problem in Song paintings. Of the more than 1,000 Song paintings in the world, only about 20% can find documentary evidence.

2

Bringing together the beauty of the Song Dynasty

　　War horses were rare in the Northern Song Dynasty, so there are many bullock carts in Bianjing City. These situations appear in the "Scenery of the Qingming River" in the late Northern Song Dynasty. However, it may not be the case for the Renzong dynasty of the country's wealthy and rich, seeing Renzong, Fan Zhongyan, and Han Qi in the play crowded in a bullock cart to stroll around the Bianjing City, it is unbearable.

　　From the perspective of the combination and composition of TV drama appliances, the real Song people's living environment has not reached such an elegant and abnormal level in the Northern Song Dynasty. For example, the furniture before the late Northern Song Dynasty had more decorative patterns and more complicated decoration. When red paint was used more, we can see this from the album of the Huizong period. Even in the album of ladies' paintings in the early Southern Song Dynasty, you can still see the coexistence of red furniture and simple furniture. In the middle and late 12th century, neat and simple furniture appeared in the painting; until the early 13th century, there will be large cases of leg bending in the court painting. Therefore, the living environment in "Qing Ping Le" actually brought the environment that appeared in the Southern Song Dynasty to the Northern Song Dynasty. This is the "aesthetic modernity" of TV series. The real environment of the Renzong dynasty should not be as expected in the TV series. But the aesthetics of the utensils at that time were earlier than the furniture.

　　Therefore, "Qing Ping Le" presents a concept of "collecting beauty", that is, bringing together the pinnacle of the Song Dynasty. This "collecting the pinnacle" aesthetic thought itself actually came into being in the late Northern Song Dynasty. At the time, Song Huizong led the creation of Xuanhe Academy of Paintings, vigorously advocated this method, and left a large number of wonderful paintings in Linyi ancient paintings. After the mid-Song Dynasty, this method was abandoned in painting.

3

Song paintings may not all bring their own "literary and artistic fan"

　　Many contemporary scholars have elaborated on Song painting, and many of them are worth rethinking. For example, it is easy to exaggerate the artistic elements of Song painting, and the words must be called "beauty", and Song painting comes with "literary and artistic fan". Song paintings introduced by many new media are mostly sweet and vulgar.

　　In fact, the paintings of the Song Dynasty were first and foremost the works of the painters at that time, which were bound to be closely related to the social environment at that time. There are more than 900 people who left their names in the Song Dynasty. These people have different personalities and aesthetics. Therefore, there must be differences in their paintings, which may not be consistent with people's aesthetics. Song paintings include not only elegant piano, chess, calligraphy and painting, but also everyday life scenes such as secular charts of salesmen and infants.

　　In other words, you can't think of Song Hua as a little girl, and dress as you want. Song paintings thousands of years ago are inconsistent with modern aesthetics, which is normal.

4

The elegance of art comes from the style of the times

　　If we go beyond aesthetics and observe academically, there has always been a deeper question: Are cultural and artistic development and social development inextricably linked to each other? Does good art depend on good society?

　　Taking "Qing Ping Le" as the observation point, we will find that the stars in the Northern Song Dynasty were shining, and the celebrities once in a thousand years would be awakened at the same time. A person who has stood in the hall, each of them can tell the story for a long time, and most of these giant stars have emerged since the Renzong period. "Qing Ping Le" visually displays this historical grand occasion. Is this accidental or inevitable?

　　While enjoying the TV series, you may be able to see the answer-although culture, art and society are not one-to-one correspondence, but the spiritual core is indeed similar.

　　We used to say that Song painting was the peak of ancient Chinese painting history, but how did this peak come? In the past, it was mostly to find the reason from the inside of the painting, saying that it was realistic, precise, strict and so on. After reading "Qing Ping Le", one may find a phenomenon: that era is more stylish.

　　Talking about the goodness of Song painting, art history used to say that it was mainly trained, but Song painting can attract so many people and it has been loved for thousands of years. Obviously it is not that simple. The starting point of Song painting is Confucian, restrained, and upright, and all its changes have not deviated from this social style. If it is entirely dependent on technology, then later generations should have the ability to copy, but we see that in the Qing Dynasty Qianlong era of the Ruyi Pavilion, although the master craftsmanship is omnipotent, but the artwork produced is spiritually different from the Song Dynasty , Similar to the distance between the Qing Opera and Qing Ping Le.

　　(The author of Liu Jiuzhou is a scholar of Song painting research, and the deputy editor-in-chief of The Complete Works of Song Painting)