La fabrica de las ilusiones: Los Jesuitas y la difusion de la perspectiva lineal en China, (1698-1766) (review)

In the past few decades, studies on the cultural contacts between China and Europe during the late Ming and early Qing period have opened new perspectives. International symposia in honor of Jesuits such as Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), Giulio Aleni (1582-1649), Johann Adam Schall von Bell (1592-1666), and Ferdinand Verbiest (1623-1688) resulted in publications that highlighted new aspects of their lives and especially how they adapted Western works on mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, and other topics for their Chinese audience.¹ Yet little attention was given to the role of art as a means of developing the missionary enterprise. Elisabetta Corsi, a sinologist at the Center for Asian and African Studies, has reversed that trend with her fascinating study on the Jesuits and the diffusion of lineal perspective in early eighteenth-century China.

This monograph portrays the history of a book, Shixue (Science of vision), whose origins developed from the friendship of Jesuit Brother Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766) and Nian Xiyao (1671-1738). In the brief introduction Corsi outlines lineal perspective in China before the arrival of Castiglione at the Beijing court in 1715 and credits Ricci with the first examples through four illustrations of his that he sent to Cheng Dayue (1541-1616?), who published them in his Chengshi moyuan.² Scattered references to perspective appeared in some later Chinese works but it was Giovanni Gherardini (1655-ca. 1723), a layman in service to the Beijing court as a painter from 1699 to 1704, who taught the technique of perspective to the artists of the court. Gherardini was a disciple in the grand tradition of the Jesuit Brother Andrea Pozzo (1642-1709), the author of Perspectiva Pictorum et Architectorum (Rome, 1693) and the architect of St. Ignatius Church in Rome. It was Pozzo's study that became the focus of Nian's Shixue.

In the first chapter Corsi presents a brief biography of Nian, who was acquainted with several Jesuits in Beijing. Nian, the older brother of the military leader Nian Gengyao (1679-1725), was a fine painter and an author of mathematical works, especially on logarithms and trigonometry. A member of the Chinese Bordered Yellow Banner, Nian Xiyao did not participate in the state examinations (p. 47), but in the first year of the reign of the Yongzheng emperor (1723-1735) he was appointed governor (xunfu) of Guangdong and concurrently vice-minister (tongzhi) of the prefecture of Jingdong in Yunnan. In 1725 he was promoted to the Ministry of Public Works and a year later became inspector of customs at Huai'an and superintendent of the imperial porcelain factory at Jingdezhen. Under his supervision until 1736 new techniques and new designs were introduced, including the famille rose. Nian was eventually removed from that office on charges of corruption and died two years later.

To explain further the connection of Nian to the Jesuits, Corsi describes his relationship with the Jesuit Jean-François Foucquet (1665-1741), who from 1711 to 1716 (not 1710, as Corsi states, incorrectly following Joseph Needham) became involved in a protracted disagreement with his confreres over the use of newer Western data supporting Copernicanism for astronomical observations in Beijing. Neither the fragments of a biography of Nian before 1720 in Chinese sources nor the Western biography of Foucquet published in 1982 portray Nian as a participant in the translations of the data on the new astronomy.3 Corsi offers the hypothesis that Nian had such a role, though she presents no supporting documentary evidence. Yet she correctly portrays Nian's views on Chinese chronology as they affected Foucquet a few years later.

In the next chapter, "The Work: Shixue or the "Science of Vision," Corsi indicates that its author, Nian Xiyao, mentions in the preface...