5. Art of Tibet and Korea

No matter how great, on the European point of view, the weakness of Chinese art, thanks to its certainty and constancy, as well as the world value of the Heavenly Empire, it managed to prescribe its laws to the arts of neighboring countries. As it spread southward, it came across a more monumental and more spirit-inspired Indian art. As noted above, in Nepal, it penetrated, at least, into the architecture of the device of the fences, and in Anam and Tonkin it defeated Indian art along the entire line. We cannot enter here into a detailed examination of the cultural exchange between China and these countries, but we consider it necessary to point out the attitude of Chinese art, on the one hand, to the art of Tibet, and on the other, to Korean art, which is important for the history of East Asian art.

With Tibet, the highest mountainous country in the Old World, China, throughout the continuation of the Middle Ages, led a bloody struggle, culminating in the recognition of Chinese domination by the Dalai Lama, according to the teachings on the transmigration of the souls of the immortal god and master of the Tibetans. In the spiritual sense, Tibet, which changed its ancient Buddhism around 1000 to reformed Buddhism, or Lamaism, influenced China, obviously, to a greater degree than China influenced it. And in Tibetan art, you can specify more such elements that have moved from it to Chinese than those that are borrowed from China. However, we still know very little about the ancient art of Tibet. Tibetan architecture did not dare to characterize even Ferguson himself. In any case, judging by the descriptions of travelers, the multistory, massive, domed buildings of Tibetan monasteries have almost nothing Chinese, and the religious paintings and sculptures brought from Tibet to Europe, if they have anything in common with the Chinese, are the only origin of the same indian source. Again, we are obliged to research in this field of art to Grunwedel, but he also gave more materials than clarifications. In Tibetan paintings, obtained by Grunwedel, the Buddhist reliefs of the Gandhara school are almost literally repeated. On the other hand, this scholar pointed out that while China held on to Buddha images of their Gandharic type, Tibet, as well as Nepal, retained for them the orthodox Old Indian type. Real life, according to Grunwedel, is not found in any of the images of the vast Buddhist Pantheon of all these northern schools. But it is very remarkable that, in contrast to China, portrait art developed along with a schematic depiction of the gods in Tibet. “The portrait of the great lama of Tibet,” Grunwedel said, “is a highly interesting reaction against schematism in the field of images of gods. In some cases, the divine is clothed in the earthly shell in the most luxurious way; the figure remains schematic and does not go beyond the frames of the canon (Buddha’s portraits) but the heads of these hierarchs in bronze and miniatures of religious art are for the most part actually executed artistically. " An example is the bronze portrait of a great lama who died in 1779 in the Berlin Museum (Fig. 603).

Fig. 603. The Great Lama. Bronze portrait statuette. According to Grunwedel

In Korea, in the northeast of China, we see nothing at all in the southwest. The inhabitants of the peninsula of Korea, like the Chinese and the Japanese, occupying the middle between them, constitute a branch of the great Mongol race. Falling under political dependence from Japan, then from China, they have long been spiritually a colony of Chinese culture. Ernst Zimmermann, based on the collection of Edward Meyer in Hamburg, compiled a brief overview of Korean art. It was recognized undoubted that this art, thanks to its strong sense of nature, enriched Chinese ornamental painting with some additions and transferred it in such an enriched form to the Japanese, who, for their part, informed her of new, original features. Japanese literature itself mentions famous Korean artists who were highly respected Japanese teachers in almost all branches of art. But it is not at all clarified how this broadcast took place. Fr Geert made an assumption, which, however, remains to this day no more than an assumption that the Upper Asian Buddhist painter Y-syong, whom Koreans call his teacher, brought a special, different from Chinese, to Korea through painting transferred from here to Japan. Zimmermann concludes that "in considering all these questions you rotate in the field of hypotheses, as so often happens on the unstable ground of East Asian art."

First of all, it would be desirable to accurately recognize the deviations of Korean art from its ancestor, Chinese art. But already in this problem we encounter difficulties. It cannot be argued that the Korean architecture differed in anything significant from the Chinese. In the field of sculpture, there can also be no talk of the special independence of Koreans. Huge, 20 meters high, round figures, carved from natural rocks, found in Korea, are considered Buddhist and, therefore, do not belong to the national Korean works. Regarding Korean painting, we only know that the paintings in Korean temples are made in Japan. Korean art is familiar to us mainly for its small products. So, on Korean painting of small forms, you can get the concept of its samples, trapped in European collections. Specifically Korean it is necessary to recognize in her the desire to directly imitate nature. Already in the painting on the fans of Meier’s collection, covering the whole area of ​​the plots of Chinese small art, “it is revealed,” said Zimmermann, “the primordial character of Korean artistic flair, the naive image of nature, resulting from the satisfaction of its impressions.” Decoration in the place of attachment to the fan handle, consisting of a plexus of branches and birds, is recognized as the Korean national.

Absolutely Korean are considered, for example, small iron boxes lined with silver, the rectangular surfaces of which are decorated in the middle with Korean Korean arms framed in lines, two fish enclosed in a circle, or unlimited images of animals and flowers in the most bizarre connection. Korean is also serpentine, which, like jade in China, serves for all sorts of products; Finally, some of the works of Korean ceramics are noted in particular by their national character. Since porcelain production in Korea itself was almost completely destroyed by the Japanese conqueror Gideioshi (1582 BC), who transported Korean potters and Korean goods to Japan, only the oldest porcelain products are found in Korea. Old vessels with a light green glaze resemble Chinese celadons. Those of them, which, judging by the brown color of their fracture, are not made of real porcelain, are decorated with chrysanthemums and other flowers, herons, weeping willows and other small images taken from nature, alien to the Chinese and according to the technique inlaid with black water on a white background. , and by natural forms. Precious Korean cream-colored vessels decorated under a glaze with a gentle, hollow relief depicting broad-leaved flowers are considered prototypes of Japanese Satsuma faience. Real Korean porcelain with blue-and-white painting above or below the glaze is distinguished by certain features, such as, for example, the use of straight planes or through-relief. Of some peculiar forms of vessels, bowls are especially remarkable, they are arranged entirely as plastic landscapes: in the middle there is a brown swamp with turtles and crabs, and around it, at the edges, are steeply rising peaks of blue mountains. Directly to Japan, we are led by the so-called рака rakyaki tea utensils, famous for their ability to keep tea warm. Such dishes have long been manufactured in Japan and, apparently, generally remained only in this country.