Chapter 13 13. Appendix 1: On "Shanshui"

We know very little about the painting of ancient Greece; but this would not be too bold a guess, it looks at people as later painters looked at landscapes.In one of the monumental pottery paintings immortalized in one of the great pictorial arts, the surroundings are merely named (houses or streets), almost abbreviated, indicated only by initials; Trees full of fruit, like blooming flowers, like spring birds singing.At that time, people treated the body like plowing a field, working for it like harvesting, having it is like occupying a good foundation, it is intuitive and beautiful, it is a picture, and all the meanings in it, gods and beasts , The senses of life are all operating in rhythmic order.At that time, although people have been going on for tens of millions of years, they still feel that they are too fresh and self-beautiful, and they cannot surpass themselves and ignore themselves.Landscapes are but: the road they walked, the road they ran, all the theaters and dance-houses where the days of the Greeks were spent; A seaport where memories return; festive nights followed by brilliant lights and orchestral music, processions to the gods and processions by the altar—these are all "landscapes" in which people live.

However, if there were no human-shaped gods living on that mountain, if there were no stone statues standing on the promontory, and the shepherd boy on the hillside had never been there.These are all rustic—they are not worth talking about.Everything is a stage, and it is empty when man does not fill the scene with joyful or mournful movements of his body. Everything waits for man, and wherever he comes, everything draws back to make room for him. Christian art has lost this relationship to the body, and has not thus been truly close to the landscape; people and things are like letters in Christian art, and they form a long line with a cursive letter at the beginning of a sentence to describe Gongyan. .People are clothes, and only have a body in hell: "landscape" should not belong to the world either.Almost always, where it is lovely, it must mean heaven; where it is horrible, desolate, it is considered the banishment of the eternally abandoned.People have seen it; because people have become narrow and transparent, but they still feel the "landscape" in their way, treating it as a short stay, as a tomb covered with green grass, connected below To hell, above unfolds the majestic heaven as the deep, original reality that all things desire.Now because suddenly there are three places, three dwellings to be talked about constantly: Heaven, Earth, Hell—then local determinations are urgently necessary, and one must see them and describe them: in the early Italian This kind of painting emerged among the painters, surpassing their original purpose and reaching a perfect state; if we just think about the murals in the holy tomb of Pisa, we will feel that the understanding of "landscape" at that time already contained some Independence too.It is true that man still wants to point out a place, and has no further intentions, but he does it with such sincerity and loyalty, and with such fascinating eloquence, even like a lover, he narrates those things that are related to the world and this place that people doubted. And the rejection of all things related to the world - from what we see now, that kind of painting is like a hymn to all things, and the saints all sing in unison.And everything that people see is very fresh, and even when they look at it, they are connected with a kind of constant surprise and joy of harvesting.It is natural that man praises heaven with earth, and when he desires with all his heart to know heaven, he is acquainted with earth.For the deepest devotion is like a kind: it rises from the earth, and always falls on it, but is the blessing of the field.

If a man feels the warmth, the happiness, and the brilliance emanating from pastures, streams, flower slopes, and fruitful trees lined up so unconsciously, if he paints those Madonnas, he uses these treasures as images for They put on a cloak, like a crown for them, and unfurl the landscape like a banner to praise them; The fidelity of this comparison: to dedicate to them all the beauty that has just been acquired, and to dissolve it with them.At this time, I no longer think about any place, nor do I think about heaven, and I start singing mountains and rivers like the hymn of the Virgin, which resounds in bright and clear colors.

But at the same time, there is a big development: when people paint landscapes, they do not mean "landscapes", but themselves; landscapes become the sustenance of human emotions, the metaphor of human joy, simplicity and piety.It becomes art.Rayonard ② just accepted it.The landscapes in his paintings are all expressions of his deepest experience and wisdom. They are blue mirrors where the mysterious laws of nature reflect self-reflection, and a great and incredible distance like "the future".Rayonard's initial painting of figures was like painting his experience and the fate he had penetrated lonelyly, so this is not accidental. He felt that landscapes were also a kind of expression of the experience, depth and sadness that could hardly be expressed in words. method.The privilege of making use of all the arts infinitely extensive was given to the forerunner of many who came after him; in the various arts he spoke, as in many languages, of his life and of its progress and distance.

No one has ever painted a "landscape" that is so completely landscape, yet so personal, and so personal, as the far-reaching background of the Mona Lisa.It seems that all human nature is contained in her eternally peaceful image, but all other things that appear in front of people or beyond the scope of people are integrated in the mysterious connection of mountains, trees, bridges, sky and water.This kind of "landscape" is not a painting of impressions, not a person's view of those still lifes; it is nature in the process of completion, the world in flux, so unfamiliar to humans, like a forest without footprints on an undiscovered island superior.And it is necessary to see Shanshui as a distant and unfamiliar, isolated and ruthless, to see it evolve completely within itself, if it should be the material and cause of any independent art; because In order for it to be an easy-to-understand metaphor for our destiny, it must be alienated from us entirely.In its sublime indifference it must be almost hostile in order to give a new interpretation of our existence in terms of things in the landscape.

Leonardo da Vinci had long expected to engage in the production of landscape art, and it was in this sense that he was doing it. It is slowly crafted from the hands of the lonely, over centuries.It's a long way to go, because it's not easy, to distance yourself from the world so that you don't see it with the paranoid eyes of the native who loves to apply what he sees to himself or herself. It's his needs above.We know how unclear people are about the things around us, and we often have to come from afar to tell us the true face of our surroundings.So man must also push all things away from himself, so that he can later be good at adopting a more correct and peaceful way, approaching them with rare kindness and awe-inspiring isolation.Because people start to understand nature when they don't understand it; when people feel that it is something else and irrelevant.Human beings come out of nature, alone, out of a lonely world, when they have no intention of containing us.

If one wants to become a landscape artist, one must do this; one should no longer feel the meaning it contains for us materially, but should see it objectively as a great existing reality. In the era when we painted people great, we used to feel him in this way; but people have become unstable, and his image has become elusive amidst changes.Nature is more permanent and greater, all movements in it are wider, and all rests are more simple and lonely.It is a longing in the human heart, to use its sublime material to speak of itself, as if to speak of some of the same entities, and thus the landscape painting without any deeds is established.People draw the empty sea, the white house on a rainy day, the road that no one walks, and the very lonely flowing water.Passion fades away more and more; the more one understands the language, the more succinctly one uses it.Man sinks into the great repose of all things, and he feels how their existence is eliminated in law, without expectation, without impatience.And among them there are animals that walk silently, bearing with them the alternation of day and night, all in order.Later someone walked into this environment and appeared from the depths of the painting as a shepherd boy, as a farmer, or simply as a figure: at that time all the boasting left him, and when we looked at him, he would become a "thing".

In the process of this "landscape art" growing into a slow "landscape of the world", there is a long-distance development of people's association.This unknowingly tells us from the content of the painting that happened in watching and working that a "future" has begun in the middle of our era: man is no longer a partner who maintains balance among his kind, nor is he that kind of person anymore. , for him there is morning and evening and distance.He is like a thing among all things, infinitely alone, and the combination of all things and people retreats to the common depth, where the roots of all growth are soaked.

①Pisa (Pisa), Italian city, the Holy Tomb (Campo Santo) was built from 1278 to 1283. ② Leonard da Vinci (Leonard da Vinci, 1452-1519), Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor and architect. "Mona Lisa" (Mona Lisa) is his masterpiece.