Contemplating The Ancients: Aesthetic And Social Issues In Early Chinese Portraiture

Contemplating The Ancients: Aesthetic And Social Issues In Early Chinese Portraiture
by Audrey G. Spiro

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About Book

Book Description
Drawing on a wide variety of contemporaneous sources from Chinese history, literature, religious writings, and art and literary criticism, Spiro provides the modern reader with an aesthetic and social context for understanding early Chinese portraiture. Contemplating the Ancients introduces portraits that were never intended to be physical likenesses of their subjects and illuminates the meaning they held for the viewers for whom they were made.
Spiro focusses on fourth- and fifth-century sets of almost identi- cal portraits of individuals known collectively in Chinese history as the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove. Unlike the earlier Han dynasty portraits whose messages were universal, these exemplary portraits addressed a specific elitist audience. The subjects of these portraits served as idealized representations for a largely nouvel-arrivé aristocracy.
Spiro examines the complex and sometimes ironic changes that occur when historical individuals are transformed by tradition into classical exemplars. She shows how the visual arts translate ideals of personal character into stylistic cues and how these cues, in turn, affect the values and behavior of human beings.

From the Inside Flap
"This book offers, on a high level of scholarship, what the Chinese art field most needs: a thorough and penetrating study of a single major work, a study that illuminates not only the work itself but also a lot of surrounding territory. Methodologically sophisticated and written in a lively style, it is worth reading."--James Cahill, University of California

From the Back Cover
"This book offers, on a high level of scholarship, what the Chinese art field most needs: a thorough and penetrating study of a single major work, a study that illuminates not only the work itself but also a lot of surrounding territory. Methodologically sophisticated and written in a lively style, it is worth reading." (James Cahill, University of California)

About the Author
Audrey Spiro teaches in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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