Treasure in "Painting from the Heavenly King"
Wu Daozi (680 ~ 759), born in Yangzhai (now Yuzhou), was the first painter in the Tang Dynasty. Wu Daozi's childhood was unfortunate. His parents died young and he lived a lonely life. Forced to make a living, he studied painting and calligraphy from an early age. Hard life and hard study made him a genius prematurely, and by the time he was about 20 years old, he was already a famous painter.
In Xuanzong of Tang Dynasty, Wu Daozi was honored as a "painting sage", folk painters called him "the founder", and Taoists even called him "Wu Daozhen Jun" and "Wu Zhenren". Su Dongpo said in the article "Painting after Wu Daozi": "Poetry is about (Du Fu), literature is about Han Tuizhi (Han Yu), book is about Yan (Yan Zhenqing), painting is about Wu Daozi, and the changes of ancient and modern times can make the world complete!" Generations of masters have been handed down from generation to generation.
Several masterpieces in Wu Daozi are all based on Pei Min's sword dance. Luoyang, the capital of East China, has seven painted walls. Among them, the murals of Tiangong Temple were painted by Wu Daozi after watching Pei Min's sword dance. Zhang Yanyuan's Note: The name of the mural "Disaster Reduction" painted by Wu at Sanmen of Tiangong Temple is "Disaster Reduction". This story is also cited as a much-told story.
Wu Daozi is an all-round painter, who can do anything with figures, ghosts and gods, landscapes, pavilions, flowers and trees, birds and animals. The period of Kaiyuan and Tianbao was the heyday of Wu Daozi's painting creation. At this time, in addition to a large number of scroll paintings, he left more than 300 murals in Luoyang and Chang 'an temples alone. According to Song Huizong and Evonne's "Xuanhe Painting Spectrum", hundreds of years later, during the Xuanhe period of the Song Dynasty, there were 93 scroll paintings by Wu Daozi in the court. At present, there are 39/kloc-0 pieces of paintings, inscriptions, paintings, poems and calligraphy, oral paintings and overseas relics related to Wu Daozi. The recognized representative works of Wu's paintings include the picture of the heavenly king sending his son, the volume of the immortals on August 7th, the statue of Confucius, the Bodhisattva, the Ghost Bo and so on.
Wu Daozi's picture of the heavenly king sending his son, also known as the picture of the birth of Sakyamuni, is a scroll of calligraphy with a length of 35.5 cm and a width of 338.38+0 cm, which has been handed down from generation to generation as a manuscript of the Song Dynasty. It was painted by Wu Daozi according to the Buddhist sutra Ruiying Benqi Sutra. As a famous painting of Buddha's birthday, we can see that Buddhism was introduced into China from India, and gradually merged with China culture from the end of Han Dynasty to the prosperous Tang Dynasty. The characters in the painting have been localized, and they are no longer as sunken and dark as Dharma, but completely China. As a Chinese painting, it also indicates the beginning of a new era of line drawing. From "iron line" to "blue line", the line drawing technique of Chinese painting has been fully prepared. No wonder Su Dongpo said: "Painting in Wu Daozi, the change of ancient and modern times, the world can do."
In the picture of the heavenly king sending his son away, the heavenly king kneels on the ground and glows at the beast. One guard desperately grabbed the reins of the beast, and the other guards drew swords and subdued it. Behind the heavenly king, the maid grinds ink, and the female minister holds a pen to record this great event. This is part of the content. King suddhodana walked steadily with the baby in her arms. The queen is holding hands, and the waiter's shoulder is fanned behind, which is another part. As far as these two parts are concerned, fierce and harmonious, strange and normal, heaven and earth, noble and humble, sparse and dense, dynamic and static, happy and angry, love and hate constitute contrast and blending everywhere. In the other part of the story, the goddess holds the stove, the ghost plays the snake, and the god beast bows down, which shows the development of the story in different levels, and shows the inner mentality of the main characters well through the foil of foreign objects. The figure movements, ghosts, dragons, lions and so on in the picture scroll are all depicted with great charm and slightly exaggerated shapes, which shows the author's artistic pursuit and interest of "innovation in statutes, ingenious reasoning". The technique of this painting focuses on lines and brush strokes, with correct strokes, smooth lines, rhythmic weight and vitality. It has the characteristics of "sparse" painting and is a typical "Wu family". The picture of the heavenly king sending his son is unique in conception, magnificent, profound in technique and complicated in utensils, which has a far-reaching influence on later religious paintings, especially Buddhist and Taoist murals. The original mural in Wu Daozi is no longer visible, and the existing paper copy is copied by later generations, which has both form and spirit and is considerable.