With the restoration of the Juanqin zhai within the Forbidden City, the scenic illusion paintings commissioned by the emperor Qianlong have received unprecedented attention. The scholarly literature in both Chinese and English on scenic illusion painting has traced a direct line of descent from the Jesuit painter Andrea Pozzo’s painting for ecclesiastical spaces. However, the discovery of one such scenic illusion painting that had originally hung as a stage backdrop furnishes visual evidence that speaks to the importance of Italian scenic design for the stage in these paintings, and allows us to see them quite literally in a new perspective. In this lecture, I address the importance of the training of the Italian painters who came to Beijing, Gherardini and Castiglione, in the Bolognese school of polyfocal perspectivalism, and most crucially, show how monofocal perspectivalism was understood by Chinese artists and theorists in terms of proportional representation. Perspectivalism is so often made to bear the weight of indexing European contact with Chinese artists; this material crucially allows us to open the conception of perspectivalism and to reduce the emphasis on monofocal perspective in scholarly thinking regarding the contact of Chinese artists with the west.

*Image: The Juanqinzhai of the Forbidden City

Biography

Sophie Volpp is Associate Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at the University of California Berkeley. The author of Worldly Stage: Theatricality in Seventeenth-Century China, she is completing a book on literary objects in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chinese fiction.