The literati were artists who painted outside the court and
royal affairs. They painted of nature and families and of things other than the
court. Three good examples of the literati painters are Shen Zhou, Wu Zhen, and
Dong Qichang.
Shen Zhou was a literati painter during the Ming Dynasty. Shen’s
most famous painting is his Lofty Mount
Lu. Shen painted this for one of his prior teachers as a birthday gift. The
peaks of the mountain are meant to show the teacher’s virtue and character. Although
Shen had never seen the mountain, he shows the enormous scale of the mountain
by painting in a tiny person at the bottom of the image. This shows the
enormity of the mountain because in the Asian style, the painting is meant to
be read from the bottom, up, with the bottom of the page being the closest part
and the top of the page being extremely far away. The fact that the person is
placed at the bottom of the page shows that even though that is the closest
part, the scale of a person is nowhere close to the scale of the mountain.
Wu Zhen was a literati painter during the Yuan Dynasty. His most
famous painting is the Stalks of Bamboo
by a Rock. He lived as a hermit, so his view of nature was different than
that of other painters. His view of the bamboo stalks each as separate pieces
in a work is different than other painters who showed clusters of bamboo stalks
as a single piece of a work. The way that Wu zooms in on the bamboo and shows
it up close has a sort of time-slowing effect, like in a movie when the slow
motion action is used, and it gives us time to really examine the bamboo in its
beautiful form.
Dong Qichang was a literati artist in the Ming Dynasty. he
was a wealthy landowner and a high official, and also a poet, calligrapher, and
painter. Dong developed the idea that most Chinese landscape painters could be
classified into two main schools of design. These were the Northern school and
the Southern school. The northern school was more precise and academic, while
the south was freer and more subjective. Dong himself was considered to be a part of the Southern
school. He painted Dwelling in the
Qingbain Mountains, which is a mixture of Dong’s own artistic innovations
like the form in which he painted the mountains, and things he borrowed from
previous painters such as the inscriptions at the top of the paper.