They rendered nature in a free, subjective style that anticipated – and of course, influenced – Van Gogh. Turning their backs on the court, intellectuals created gardens, wrote poetry and painted expressive scenes of wintry trees. After the Mongols conquered China there was a clear association of art with the rejection of power. Yet for me, the escapist pursuit of pastoral in China's pioneering landscapes is utterly beguiling. There are pictures of courtesans and the tremendous Nine Dragons, a dazzling mythic vision painted by Chen Rong in 1244. Not all the works in this exhibition are landscapes. Indeed, as the curator explains, painting in China has always been associated with retreat and escapism. One of the first things you see in the show was actually painted by a Song emperor – though it comes with a warning to rulers, for Emperor Huizong's dreamy fascination with art helped to lose him his throne. The scientific mind that perfected porcelain also looked at nature with a new clarity. It also has to do with the technical achievements of the Song era. Bruegel's much-loved Hunters in the Snow has all the elements that delighted medieval Chinese landscape painters, including all that snow.īut why did China invent landscape art in the first place? Why did artists begin to depict, not gods and battles as elsewhere, but the grandeur of nature? It has something to do with Buddhism, which spread to China before AD1,000 and inspired a culture of contemplation. Zhang points out that Pieter Bruegel the Elder is also very "Chinese" looking.
Nor is Leonardo the only European pioneer of landscape who looks "Chinese". Zhang's well aware of this idea: it was raised very seriously in the 1950s, he says, but there is no proof. The shapes of the hills and trees in Leonardo's sketch perfectly mirror the sugar-loaf peaks and willowy trees in 900-year-old Chinese paintings. Could he somehow have seen Chinese paintings? Might something have reached the west along the Silk Road? Excitedly, I get Leonardo's 1473 drawing up on my iPad and hold it among the 12th-century Chinese landscapes for comparison. Looking at this show being installed and talking to its curator Zhang Hongxing, I can't resist airing the theory that Leonardo stole the idea of landscape painting from China. It shows that during the Song dynasty, at a time when Europeans were fighting barbaric crusades and had long forgotten the creativity that flourished in ancient Greece, artists in China were taking painting to heights of sensitivity and poetry that would not be attained elsewhere until the ages of Leonardo – or for that matter, when you look at the most radical Chinese touches, Van Gogh. Masterpieces of Chinese Painting is the most devastating refutation of such assumptions I have ever seen. All peoples make art, but the west takes it forward.
Yet the story of art that most of us absorb – as told in The Story of Art by EH Gombrich, first published in 1950 and still the definitive account of art's progress – puts European innovation at the centre of the action. It is conventional, nowadays, to pay lip service to the fact that many versions of art exist, that beautiful art comes from all over the world and every way of life. That's 353 years before the very similar sketch by Leonardo. When was that painted? I look at the label in the V&A's new exhibition Masterpieces of Chinese Painting. It is bizarre: that 1473 drawing actually looks like a reworking of classic Chinese paintings such as Li Gongnian's Winter Evening Landscape. There is an uncanny likeness between Leonardo's rocks, trees and rivers and the rocks, trees and rivers that Chinese artists were painting centuries before he was born.
Yet it is a lot less original than we might like to think.
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