the article has been part of the interventions of the 27th -29th November 2020 conference: The Annual Kurultai of the Endangered Cultural Heritage – AKECH 3rd edition; The Annual Lecture on Exile in Comparative Literature and the Arts – ALECLA 3rd edition
Issue 2 – By; Giacomo Bruni
Read More
Issue 1 – Author: Giacomo Bruni
Wenrenhua, (Chinese: “literati painting”) refers to an ideal form of the Chinese scholar-painter who was more interested in personal cultivation and expression than in literal representation or an immediately attractive surface beauty. First formulated in the Northern Song period (960–1127)—at which time it was called shidafuhua 士大夫画 by the poet-calligrapher Su Dongpo 苏东坡 – the ideal of wenrenhua was finally and enduringly codified by the great Ming dynasty critic and painter Dong Qichang 董其昌 .
According to the principle of wenrenhua, the completely literate, cultured artist—learned in all the humane arts—who revealed the privacy of his vision in his painting was preferred over the “professional,” whose paintings were more obviously pleasing to the eye. The contrast is overly categorical, but it is useful still in understanding the major interests and intentions of Chinese painters through the ages.
Read More
Issue 1 – Author: Claudio D. Lucchi
A brief study of its continuity and significance in Mountain and water painting (Part I)
Chinese ink-wash painting (shuimo hua 水墨畫) was already practiced during the Tang dynasty. Since then, this particular art form has never ceased to develop. Carefully handed down from one generation of painters to the next, treated like a rare and precious flower by Chinese painters and literati alike, Chinese ink-wash painting has always been (and still is today) a topic of discussion.
Read More
Issue 1 – Author: Liu Wendong
Reviving the unconstrained color and seeking for the blue-green painting 《重温逍遥色 再寻青绿颜》
The history of the development of Chinese mountain and water painting has gradually evolved from expressing human space cosmic consciousness to personalization, which is basically similar to Russell’s description of the history of scientific development: “The sciences have developed in an order the reverse of what might have been expected. What was most remote from ourselves was first brought under the domain of law, and then, gradually, what was nearer: first the heavens, next the earth, then animal and vegetable life, then the human body, and last of all (as yet very imperfectly) the human mind.” （Religion and Science, 1935）Judging from many existing traditional blue-green mountain and water paintings 青绿山水画, in the initial state of this artistic expression, the favorite subject was the supernatural realm, that is very far away from the human life.
Read More
Issue 1 – Author: Giacomo Bruni
Paolo D’Angelo is a professor of Aesthetics at the University of Roma Tre. A graduate of the University of Roma Uno, “La Sapienza”, he received his PhD (Dottorato) from the University of Bologna. He was also the Head of the Department of Philosophy, Communication, Media and Performing Arts of Roma Tre University from January 2013 to December 2018.
He was formerly a professor at Messina University (1999-2000). He has taught Aesthetics at Roma Tre since September 2004.
Chief areas of interest: Aesthetics of the visual arts; environmental Aesthetics; analytic Aesthetics; History of Aesthetics; German philosophy; contemporary Italian philosophy.
Read More
Issue 1 – Author: Giacomo Bruni
Italo Calvino Hypothesis of description of a landscape
Whenever I have tried to describe a landscape, the method to be followed in the description becomes just as important as the described landscape: I start by conceptualizing that the operation is simple, delimiting a piece of space and describing everything I see in it; but here I have to decide if I want to portray what I see from a standing point of view, as painters usually stand, or at least they used to at the time when painters painted landscapes from real – time which lasted three centuries to say the least, a phase very short in the history of painting – or to portray it moving from one point to another within the piece of space so that I can say what I see from different perspectives. Multiplying the points of view within a three-dimensional space. This second system presents itself as the most correct when it comes to a rather large space, where the eyes cannot embrace its surroundings in a single glance; just as how the act of writing is an act of movement in itself. Like how when I’m sitting here writing, I may seem still, but it’s the eyes that move, the outer eyes run back and forth following the line of letters that runs from one edge of the sheet to the other, and the inner eyes also run back and forth between the scattered things of memory, and they try to give it a sequence, to draw a line between the discontinuous points that memory keeps isolated, torn from the true experience of space; I have to reconstruct a continuity that has been erased from my memory with the footprint of my steps or the wheels that led me along paths that was once taken hundreds of times. So, it is natural that a written description is an operation that stretches space over time. Unlike a painting, or even more than a photograph, which concentrates time in a fraction of a second until it disappears as if space could exist on its own and enough for itself. But I must say that while I scroll through the landscape to describe it from different points of its space, I am also scrolling through the different moments in time when I was in motion. Therefore, a description of a landscape, being charged with temporality, is always a story: there is an ego in movement, and each element of the landscape is charged with its temporality, which is, with the possibility of being described in another present or future moment.
Italo Calvino
Issue 1 – Author: Giacomo Bruni
Why do we say “mountain and water painting” and not how it would be customary to say, “landscape painting”? Mountain and water painting is the literal translation of the Chinese denomination Shanshui hua 山水画, therefore the field of our artistic productions and observations that are going to be made will belong to the sphere of Chinese painting. But this is not the only reason, nor is it the most important one.
