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Now let's look at another example
of Chinese literati painting.
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And this is Shen Zhou, and
this is his "Poet on a Mountaintop"
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from the Ming dynasty,
and this is ink.
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We have just a little bit of color,
just a little bit of you know grey color
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and, of course, the red
of the seal over here.
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And that's part of what
we call a handscroll, okay?
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So, this is now-- is not a
longitudinally oriented scroll,
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but is more of a horizontal and is read
more like what you would think of
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as a scroll, okay?
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And so this is not that large.
It's two feet by a foot and half or so.
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So from about the same
period of time, a little bit earlier.
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You can see here that Shen Zhou
also created works that are perhaps
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more typical of the sorts of
things that we saw earlier.
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And these, you know large hanging
scrolls with this very dramatic landscape
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and, I'm going to say some
of this is quite exaggerated.
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I mean, we have seen
some of this landscape.
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But, it's interesting because,
when you look at these,
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you can really see that they're
very very differentiated
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even though they are,
many of them landscapes.
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But this particular one
we're looking at today,
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"Poet on a Mountaintop" I think is
one that has captured people's
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attention and interest for a long time
because it is so evocative
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of literati painting.
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Handscrolls, so what we think
of with the handscroll is it's
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rolled up and, again,
other cultures that use scrolls,
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this is probably something
that is a little bit--
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if you think of the Egyptians or
some of the ancient Jewish monks,
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the Dead Sea scrolls,
those types of things.
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These are more of that kind of scroll,
that you're reading it almost like a book.
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So this is how this was set up.
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I want to go a little bit further
into this idea of the literati
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and the painting and one of the things
about Chinese painting in general
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this literati tradition but even
the court painting, to some degree,
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is this idea of you follow
the three perfections.
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And the three perfections are
calligraphy, poetry, and painting.
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And, we've talked about this
in the earlier painting.
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And, we've talked about how calligraphy,
you know, the beautiful writing here
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is very important-- it's almost the act
of inking this and making these marks
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is almost an act of
meditation and devotion.
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If we look at Islamic manuscripts
oftentimes that sense of writing
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the Quran in calligraphy
is actually a devotional act,
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and we can think of this
as something sort of similar.
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And the fact that you
would both paint this
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and write poetry about this event,
and all of this is sort of reflecting
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the inner life of the artist is
very typical of literati painting.
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This portrait of a literati painter
that I showed you before
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is actually thought to be
a portrait of Shen Zhou
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who was an artist for
a very long period of time.
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He paints this image here,
"Poet on a Mountain Top"
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fairly late in his career, in his life,
but he was one of the most prolific
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of the literati painters
during the Ming dynasty.
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So, and this is in your book,
so there is--
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there's something about
the intimate look of this.
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the smaller scale, it's not
a massive scale or scene
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river all the way up
to the mountain,
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it's much more man,
person, human being scale.
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And that is, it much more encompasses
what you can see in one view
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as opposed to that idea of your eye
traveling for some time through a view.
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And so here you can see the
poem that is written over here
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and this is the translation:
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"White clouds, like a scarf,
enfold the mountain's waist."
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So first of all, oh yeah
there are the clouds.
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I mean (laughs)
this is paper and ink.
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You know, this is just, notice how just
the smallest amount of gray tone here
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gives us the sense that we've
emerged on this mountain top
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above the clouds,
it's really remarkable.
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"Stone steps hang in space,"
you know this idea that, again,
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you sort of emerge up here
and you're hanging in space--
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"a long narrow path.
Alone, leaning on my cane,
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I gaze intently at the scene. And feel
like answering the murmuring brook
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with the music of my flute," okay?
And so this is, you know, as I said
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this is towards the end of his life,
so he's got a cane and he's going up here
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and he's taking in all the world
and he enfolds not only the art
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and the poetry and the scenery,
but also the music into this.
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And so, this is in so many ways the
epitome of this kind of literati painting.
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I want you to also
notice the composition
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and in this case, sometimes it seems as
though the poetry is tagged on at the end
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but in this case, the poetry is
part and parcel of the composition.
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And, it's almost as if this little figure
here is facing off towards the poetry.
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And you have this massive
rock here in the center,
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and then the sort of fading away
of the mountain and the clouds.
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It's beautifully,
beautifully composed.
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It's not symmetric,
but we would call this balanced.
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And so, we have these various diagonals,
that are here and here and here.
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But, there is a sense of symmetry,
there's a sense of balance,
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there's a sense of some of
these compositional elements
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repeating each other and
giving this overall organization.
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Oftentimes we celebrate in art
the big and showy and the big dramas
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and the battles,
all those sorts of things,
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but art also captures these
very small, very intimate,
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very quiet moments, and this is certainly
one of the most sublime of them all.
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In the next segment, we're going
to follow through on this
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and look at how this manifests
itself in garden design.