The Development of Murals in Sui, Tang and Five Dynasties
Due to the prosperity of economy and the opening of society, the murals in Sui, Tang and Five Dynasties developed greatly. For example, the Tang Dynasty murals in Dunhuang are the most brilliant, rich in content and form, and their contents focus on reflecting real life and people's yearning for and pursuit of a happy life. Moreover, the forms and techniques of murals are also varied: some win with colorful changes; Some are good at line drawing; Some scenes are grand, complex, warm and touching; Some use the psychology of characters to depict subtle feelings. In modeling, the proportion of human body is moderate, such as: Bodhisattva's face has a broad forehead, a long round face, exquisite facial features, high hair bun, wearing a jewelry crown, bare chest and gorgeous clothes; Some faces are fat and elegant; Some twisted into an "S" shape, full of twists and turns. During the Tianbao period of Kaiyuan, there appeared a bodhisattva statue of Yang Guifei, which was "plump and greasy" and "bent eyebrows and half cheeks". Moreover, the bodhisattva in the Tang Dynasty was further feminized. Although people have tadpoles and moustaches on both sides, the dynamic expression is no longer masculine. Buddhist disciples also changed from Brahma to Han monks. It reflects the differences in age, experience and personality from the aspects of appearance, posture, clothing and expression.
At the same time, the Sui, Tang and Five Dynasties continued the custom of thick burial since the Han Dynasty, and the tombs were generally large in scale, with murals in the tombs of emperors and nobles. The Tang Dynasty is the most complete period of preservation of the original tomb murals, and most of them have exact dates, which can completely reflect the development of paintings in the Tang Dynasty. Among them, the most complete and earliest preserved murals in the Tang Dynasty include Li Shou's tomb, Zhong's tomb, Zheng Rentai's tomb, etc., and the murals in the prosperous Tang Dynasty include Prince Li Chongrun, Yide Prince Li Chongrun, Yongtai Princess Li Xianhui, Wei Dong's tomb, etc. Because the owner of the tomb has a prominent life experience, most painters may be masters of painting at that time, so the murals handed down from generation to generation in the Tang Dynasty are generally of a high level, showing a purely enjoyable life. At the same time, because of the large-scale tomb murals, which reflect a wide range of social life, they provide us with rare materials for studying life in the Tang Dynasty and other arts, such as music, dance and architecture.
During the Sui and Tang Dynasties, murals were a large number of paintings, such as palaces, temples, hotels, grottoes, tombs and other places, which were magnificent, magnificent and breathtaking. But at this time, scroll painting began to rise, and gradually became popular because of its convenience for creation, collection and appreciation, making the artist's creative world more free and broad. Scroll painting is a form classification of Chinese painting, which is strictly different from mural painting and has formed a unique mounting art in the long-term development. Its characteristics are: the use of various forms of expression, such as meticulous painting, ink freehand brushwork, boneless, line drawing and so on. , fully show the brush and ink techniques of Chinese painting, with a wide range of subjects, including figures, flowers and birds, landscapes and so on. It can also be integrated with poetry, calligraphy and seal cutting to form a unique style, which is convenient for long-term preservation and orderly circulation. In the history of painting in China, Gu Kaizhi in the Eastern Jin Dynasty pioneered scroll painting.
According to legend, You Chuntu, a silk book painted by Zhan Ziqian in the Sui Dynasty (about 550-604 AD), is the earliest existing landscape painting. Collected in the Palace Museum in Beijing, there are comments on "Zhang Shan, Ruler Tree, Cunma, Bean Man". The ratio between man and nature is reasonable, which is quite different from the situation of the previous generation that "water is not allowed to be flooded and there are more people than mountains". It became a masterpiece of the rise of scroll landscape painting, which played a direct role in promoting the emergence of green mountains and green waters in later generations.