Space in classical Chinese and Italian painting

Abstract

This article offers a comparative view of the development of representations of architectural and open spaces in Chinese and Italian paintings and drawings. Architectural historians have long discussed the concept of space within theories of aesthetic perception and cognition. Their works, however, have bound the study of spatial conception to extraneous notions such as artistic freedom, and to a teleological view of Modernism as the end(s) of all spatial development in architecture and its artistic representation. Examining the representation of space in premodern art makes it possible to understand spatial articulation in architecture, urban and landscape design in terms of the cultures that produced it, free from the assumptions of modern theory. Chinese and Italian art of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as seen through the eyes of sixteenth-century critics, is particularly relevant to such a study: both traditions reckoned with their past in light of contemporary efforts to assert new systems of territorial governance and to define the relationship between technical and gentlemanly approaches to art and architecture. Through a study of a few canonical works of two-dimensional spatial representation, the article explores concepts such as void and form, depth and shallowness, and their political and cultural significance in both societies.

Keywords: ARCHITECTURAL SPACE, PERSPECTIVE, CULTURAL HISTORY, CHINA, ITALY

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