The second of the salient characteristics of the Yuan renascence, the perception of a

recoverable past, begins with Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322) and his teacher Qian Xuan
燖浫 (c. 1235–before 1307), though Qian was already nearly thirty years old when
the Song
Dynasty finally fell.32 Some Western texts on Zhao have difficulty making a
convincing case
for his greatness in the eyes of later Chinese landscape painters, but several traits
are still
discernible: an incisive anatomy of the history of Song painting; a distancing from
that same
tradition (even though it extended, in effect, through his own generation); and a
stylistic
essentialism that crystallized the Song and Tang styles. The dry bones and
schematic clarity
of Zhao Mengfu’s paintings are markers of a consciously achieved triumph of
classificatory
historical evaluation, and it is here that his parallel to Renaissance artists is most
apparent
(plate 10). Without insisting on names, this recalls Leon Battista Alberti’s evaluation
of
ancient and medieval painting; Brunelleschi’s simplified, elegant transformations of
Roman
and Tuscan Romanesque; or Masaccio’s “disregard” for landscape and ornament in
favor
of disegno and relievo.33 Each of those artists embarked on a largely unaided—if not
Plate 10: Zhao Mengfu, attr., Orchid Flowers, Bamboo, and Rocks, detail. 1302. Shanghai Museum of Art.
78 Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History
entirely unprecedented—historical revaluation, and each found it necessary to
accompany
classification with historical as well as formal simplification.
Zhao and artists close to him revived more traditions than any one of those Western
artists—a further instance of the richness typical of the historiography of Chinese
painting.
Some of Zhao’s preferred modes, such as the Dong-Ju style, 34 the Li-Guo style,35 and
a
late Northern Song style exemplified by the painter Qiao Zhongchang ౝɇᬷౝ,36 are
chronologically analogous to Renaissance revivals in that they involve a period of
time—
much shorter in China than in the West—in which the style in question had fallen
into
misuse or disuse.37 However, Zhao’s remote, refined Mind Landscape of Xie Youyu
“may
have been meant as an imaginary re-creation” of a version by Gu Kaizhi 禵’Š (c.
345–
406)—a “revival” or remembrance over a gap of nearly one thousand years, and
therefore a
historical gesture on the scale of the Renaissance revivals of Roman architecture