Nineteen of the twenty items in Longmen are in Guyang Cave, and only one is in Cave 660 outside Laolong Cave. Most of the meritorious persons in these statues are princes, nobles, senior officials and eminent monks of the Northern Wei Dynasty.
They sang praises to Emperor Xiaowen or opened niches and statues to pray for wealth and ward off disasters. Most of their names are recorded in history books. These statue records often involve historical facts from that year. Therefore, the Longmen Twenty Pieces are not only the essence of the calligraphy art of the Northern Wei Dynasty and the representative work of Wei stele calligraphy, but also historical materials with research value.
Introduction
The Longmen Twenty Pins refers to the inscriptions on the twenty-square statues in the Longmen Grottoes during the Northern Wei Dynasty. It is a representative of Wei stele calligraphy. The Wei stele inherits the Han Li script on the top and Tang Kai script on the bottom, which has the charm of both Li and regular script.
Nineteen of them are in Guyang Cave and one is in Cixiang Cave. The title of "Twenty Grades" was first seen in "Guang Yi Zhou Shuang Ji" written by Kang Youwei in the Qing Dynasty and "Essays on the School Stele" written by Fang Ruo. The content generally expresses the statue's creator's prayers for blessings and disaster relief.
Its calligraphy art developed and evolved on the basis of Han Li and Jin Kai, thus forming a unique style that is dignified, strong and simple, with both official script style and regular script elements. It is the calligraphy of the Northern Wei Dynasty. The essence of art and the representative of the "Wei Stele" style.
From the perspective of the pen posture, the pen stroke shows the edge. When writing horizontal strokes, press vertically downward first and then move horizontally to the upper right. Mr. Ping Qifan believes that the reason why this phenomenon of "if you want to be horizontal is to be vertical first, and if you want to be vertical is to be horizontal" is ultimately due to the fact that people write with their right hand.
For right-handed writing, the best lines are straight lines from top to bottom, from left to right and "S"-shaped curves. This "S"-shaped curve, which is most suitable for right-handed writing, is compressed. To a certain extent, the pen pattern of "If you want to be horizontal, you should be vertical first, if you want to be vertical, you should be horizontal" will appear. Horizontal drawings with square heads and square tails and parallelograms can be seen everywhere in the statue records. This should be influenced by the printing tools at that time.
In addition, in the inscriptions of the Longmen statues, the horizontal paintings often appear to be clearly tilted to the upper right, and the ripples are obvious, with obvious official meaning, which is manifested by pressing the pen and picking up the front when closing the pen. , the "point" paintings in the inscriptions of the "Twenty-Rank" statues are mostly in the shape of a triangle, which is due to the influence of the carving knife.
The knife on the stone is relatively slow and jerky, not as smooth and fast as the pen on the paper. At the same time, due to the influence of official script, the stipples on the Wei stele have upward wavy feet; some of the stipples are written horizontally. , connecting the juxtaposed stipples horizontally into one.