Section 3 Calligraphy of Western Zhou Dynasty

King Wu joined forces with Yong, Qiang, Shu, Wei and other governors to destroy the merchants and establish the Zhou Dynasty. King Wu completed his martial arts, and the sandwich was left to his successor. His son became king when he was young, and Zhou Gongdan was the regent. Although the Duke of Zhou made many achievements in pacifying the Guan and Cai Rebellion, his greatest contribution was the system of rites and music, which established relatively perfect rules and regulations in the Zhou Dynasty, thus opening a prosperous period of rites and music culture in the history of China. This prosperous time began with the founding of the King of Wu. The kings of Cheng, Kang, Zhao, Mu, Gong, Yi, Filial Piety, Yi, Li, * * and Yi and You, the city of Beijing was broken by dogs, which is called the Western Zhou Dynasty in history. In the Western Zhou Dynasty for more than 350 years, calligraphy art, as an inseparable part of the ritual and music culture, also fully reflected the ideal construction of order by the literati in the Western Zhou Dynasty. The calligraphy of the Western Zhou Dynasty is represented by the bronze inscriptions on ritual vessels, which have a wide variety and endless meanings. Oracle Bone Inscriptions in the Western Zhou Dynasty was discovered in Feng Chu Village, Qishan, Shaanxi Province. Although each has its own characteristics, the weather is less and the time is earlier, which can be regarded as the remains of Oracle bones in Yin Shang Dynasty.

I. purification of lines and sequencing of structures

With the continuous establishment and improvement of the laws and regulations system in the Western Zhou Dynasty, the country and the world have also experienced some border management. For example, "All over the world, can it be that the king is full of soil (The Book of Songs, Beishan). The Western Zhou Dynasty was established after Hou Ji, the ancestor of agricultural civilization, and the land system adopted the "well field system". Minefield is the epitome of Kyushu, the "nine officials" in the abstract concept, and the foundation of the ritual and music culture in the Western Zhou Dynasty. As a result, the ideal of harmonious and orderly order was institutionalized and conceptualized, and it was carried out at all levels of the ritual and music culture in the Western Zhou Dynasty.

What is the orderly process shown in the inscriptions on bronze in the Western Zhou Dynasty? As we know, the inscriptions in the early Western Zhou Dynasty have retained the characteristics of the inscriptions in the late Shang Dynasty in terms of glyphs, lines and meanings. But gradually, in the above aspects, they all showed the unique style of inscriptions in the Western Zhou Dynasty, which finally made the unique character of calligraphy in the Western Zhou Dynasty stand out.

In the Western Zhou Dynasty, Oracle Bone Inscriptions first adjusted the writing style, and incorporated the rules of procession writing initiated by Oracle Bone Inscriptions in Shang Dynasty into the ranks, which were stipulated in a harmonious and orderly framework. As far as we know, Kang Wang's Ming of Geng Ying and the famous Ming of Da Ding (Color Picture 2) showed strict order in apologizing.

Orderly lines and styles make everyone's words conform to the standards. Every glyph is no longer free and random, its length, width and narrowness are all limited in the same given space, and its appearance tends to be harmonious and orderly, which eventually leads to square and orderly. After the completion of the external regulation of the glyph, it will further turn to the adjustment and construction of the internal order.

The internal order construction of inscriptions on bronze in the Western Zhou Dynasty was carried out simultaneously from two aspects: the purification of lines and the order of space. The flat filling structure contained in the bronze inscriptions of Shang Dynasty was sublated by the typical bronze inscriptions of Western Zhou Dynasty. Even the same linear lines are quite different in Shang and Zhou bronze inscriptions. During the Shang and Jin Dynasties, the line quality had obvious thickness changes, or it was rich in the middle and pointed at the end, or it was heavy and light, and lines often had obvious primary and secondary weight in one word.

Now let's look at the ordering of the internal space of bronze inscriptions. This is manifested in two aspects: first, the inscriptions on bronze inscriptions are incorporated into the orderly frame of ranks, and the internal structure of the characters is also constructed with reference to the orthogonal frame, so that the internal space is balanced and orderly. Secondly, the purification of lines enhances the shaping of structural space. In addition to the single structure and peripheral structure, the inscriptions on bronze in the Western Zhou Dynasty also refined the combination of two recognized radicals, which were the rise and fall of Yin and Yang, the concealment of Qu and Qi, organic coordination and seamless. This structure is not a simple juxtaposition and stacking of components, nor a geometric pattern cut by a knife ruler, but an organism full of life. Such an organic structure was not found in calligraphy before the Western Zhou Dynasty, and the radical combination of Xiao Zhuan after that was even more unsustainable.