Giuseppe Castiglione

Giuseppe Castiglione (Chinese name Lang Shining, 郎世宁; July 19, 1688 – July 17, 1766) was an Italian, a Catholic Jesuit brother and Chinese court painter, whose realistic style recorded the people and scenery of the early Qing court.

Life

Giuseppe Castiglione was born on July 19, 1688, in the parish of San Marcellino in the Brera district of Milan, Duchy of Milan (the church no longer exists). From childhood he was shaped by a rich artistic and cultural environment, and as a young man he studied painting and architecture with Carlo Cornara, copying his teacher’s works and paintings collected in Milan.

In 1707 (aged 19), Castiglione entered the Society of Jesus in Genoa, at first painting murals only for churches in Italy. In 1714 he lived in Lisbon and Coimbra in Portugal. Castiglione gradually developed a strong interest in China.

In 1715 (the 54th year of Kangxi), Castiglione set out for China. He first studied Chinese in Macau and took “Lang Shining” as his Chinese name. Afterwards the Kangxi Emperor summoned him to court as an artist; once he became a court painter he painted in the studio every day. Most of the commissions from Kangxi have been lost, with only a few surviving, so their subject matter is unknown. He also continued to study Chinese and Manchu.

In 1722 (the 61st year of Kangxi), the Kangxi Emperor died at the Changchun Garden in Beijing. When the Yongzheng Emperor came to the throne, he banned Christianity and ordered the missionaries in China expelled, with the sole exception of missionaries serving at court. So Castiglione was not only not expelled but treated with even greater favour, because his lively, realistic style of painting won the Yongzheng Emperor’s favour. In this period he painted works such as Juruitu (Gathering of Auspicious Objects), Songxian Yingzhi Tu (Pine, Eagle and Lingzhi), and Eight Steeds, displaying the European chiaroscuro style and making European oil-painting techniques highly fashionable at court. When the Yongzheng Emperor ordered the Yuanmingyuan expanded, he took part in its planning and design, drew the plans for the garden’s construction, and painted many works to decorate its halls.

In 1728 (the 6th year of Yongzheng), Castiglione completed an important commission, One Hundred Horses. Using the sense of perspective of theatre painting, he showed a hundred horses moving about an open landscape; all of them were the emperor’s horses. In One Hundred Horses Castiglione at once let everyone see his originality — combining Italian methods with Chinese aesthetics. His method was to use vanishing-point perspective (linear perspective), also called straight-line perspective, combining it with the Chinese way of handling pictorial space. So within one painting, some parts follow the rules of perspective, while other parts follow the isometric projection (axonometric isometric projection) used by Chinese painters, or elsewhere atmospheric perspective (atmospheric perspective) with ink wash and liquid pigments — for example in the contrast of image and colour.

In 1735 (the 13th year of Yongzheng), the Yongzheng Emperor died. When the Qianlong Emperor succeeded him, Castiglione was employed even more, since Qianlong loved the arts. He accompanied the Qianlong Emperor on tours many times and attended all kinds of major occasions, creating a body of art treasures of great historical value; a representative work is The Qianlong Emperor’s Grand Review. He continued as architectural designer of the Western-style buildings (Xiyanglou) of the Yuanmingyuan, and for a time also held the post of head of the Fengchen Yuan, the office in charge of the imperial gardens, an official of the first class of the third rank.

In 1747 (the 12th year of Qianlong), Castiglione recommended Michel Benoist (蒋友仁), a French Catholic Jesuit missionary who had likewise come to China, and the Qianlong Emperor appointed him designer of the “Great Fountain” (Da Shuifa) of the Yuanmingyuan (fountains including the twelve zodiac animal heads used as spouts).

In 1758 (the 23rd year of Qianlong), the Qianlong Emperor held a seventieth-birthday celebration for Castiglione, evidence of the favour and esteem he enjoyed at court. In his later years he also painted many portraits of the Qianlong Emperor and his consorts.

In 1766 (the 31st year of Qianlong), Castiglione died at the age of 78, and was posthumously given the rank of vice-minister (shilang). He was buried in the Tenggong Zhalan cemetery.

Western missionary painters after him included Jean Denis Attiret (王致诚), Ignaz Sichelbarth (艾启蒙), Louis de Poirot (贺清泰), and Giuseppe Panzi (潘廷章).

Castiglione’s paintings fetch very high prices in today’s Chinese-painting auction market. At the end of April 2000, his Pingye Mingqiu (Deer Calling in Autumn on the Plain) sold for HK$17.645 million, at that time the second-highest price for a Chinese painting. In May 2005 his Qiulin Qunlu (Herd of Deer in an Autumn Forest) reached RMB 21.4968 million, and in January 2020 Zhaopen Haier Tu (Children Looking into a Basin) was hammered down at NT$101 million.

Mission

Although Castiglione first came to China as a missionary, after the Yongzheng Emperor banned Christianity he was not driven out of the Forbidden City but was treated with great favour, in large part because he held the post of court painter in the Qing palace. Although he himself never forgot his wish to spread the faith, under the ban any act that looked like an attempt to evangelize was forbidden, so he was never able to fulfil that wish in his lifetime. For this reason in China he is usually called a court painter and seldom a missionary.

Assessment

Castiglione spent most of his life in China, through the three reigns of Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong — about fifty years in all. He not only left later generations a large number of valuable paintings but also contributed to some degree to cultural exchange between China and the West. His court paintings blend Chinese and Western art, showing both the realism, three-dimensionality, and attention to line and structure of Western painting and the expressiveness and charm of traditional Chinese painting; over decades of exploration he worked to fuse Chinese and Western techniques and created a distinctive style. Although they have a certain artistic value, his paintings put more weight on technique than on artistic exploration, and so they are not regarded as great works either in China or in the West. He also took part in planning and designing the Yuanmingyuan, whose buildings, setting, and forms adopted the Western Baroque style, while the decorative details carry an Eastern, Chinese artistic spirit. He introduced the Renaissance technique of realistic chiaroscuro and switched to painting with glue-based pigments on xuan paper, which is today’s method of gouache-on-silk (jiaocai) painting. He petitioned the Kangxi Emperor to open a school teaching painting by Western principles of perspective, but this was not adopted; later, with his contemporary, the official and scholar Nian Xiyao (年希尧), he published Shixue (The Science of Vision), China’s first specialist work on Western perspective.

Works

Castiglione’s representative works include Eight Steeds, Juruitu (Gathering of Auspicious Objects; 1723, the 1st year of Yongzheng), Songxian Yingzhi Tu (Pine, Eagle and Lingzhi; 1724, the 2nd year of Yongzheng), The Qianlong Emperor’s Grand Review, Portrait of the Qianlong Emperor in Court Robes, One Hundred Horses, Portraits of Hongli and His Empress and Consorts, Battle Scenes of the Pacification of the Western Regions, Ten Fine Hounds, and the Western-style buildings of the Yuanmingyuan. Later art critics considered his horses the most lifelike of all.