Bob McDaniel wrote:
>
> The answer put forward in a source I read many years ago was that China lacked
> the insight of perspective, which was a key development in European painting
> and was an element, I believe, of the Enlightenment. This was, in effect, an
> "enabling" technology which seemed to open European minds to an
> entrepreneurial, analytical and empirical approach to problem-solving.
>
> Anyone know the source?
Not I, and it *may* be true that the Chinese did not have
the kind of rigorous perspective, like in the Durer print
of the artist staring at his model with one eye through a wood
frame with regularly spaced grid lines and transcribing
what he saw on paper with similarly spaced grid lines.
But at least by the 12th Century the Chinese
had the kind of perspective which one sees
in Renaissance Madonna and child, and portrait painting
backgrounds. The Metropolitan Museum
claims to have one of the first of these
paintings, but theirs may be a forgery.
As you can read from this little paraphrase of
something Needham wrote
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/essays.html#m5
the Chinese may have had *more* perspective than
at least some of the relatively advanced Europeans of the
16th/17th Centuries (so to speak).
Aside: There is a lovely little book about the
advent of uniformly reproducible images:
_Prints and Visual Communication_, William
Ivins (MIT Press).
\brad mccormick
>
> Bob
>
> Ed Goertzen wrote:
>
> > Needham's orienting
> > question was: Why, when China was in many ways more
> > advanced than Europe even in the 1500s, did Europe "take
> > off" but China remained in feudalism?
--
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
-------------------------------------------------------
<![%THINK;[XML]]> Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
