Get Traditions Of Literati Painting

In reducing the scale of their paintings, they also developed innovative ways to use abbreviated lines and ink washes to represent effectively landscape features which the Northern Song masters had rendered with intense detail.

literati, scholars in China and Japan whose poetry, calligraphy, and paintings were supposed primarily to reveal their cultivation and express their personal feelings rather than demonstrate professional skill.

Expert-Verified Answer. The spirit of antiquity was an important aspect of literati painting. They were priced above academic paintings.

The literati painting or wenrenhua (文人畫) is the ideal form of the Chinese scholar-painter who was more interested in personal erudition and expression than in literal representation or an immediately attractive surface beauty.

The Chinese painter uses essentially the same materials as the calligrapher—brush, ink, and silk or paper—and the Chinese judge his work by the same criteria they use for the calligrapher, basically the vitality and expressiveness of the brushstroke itself and the harmonious rhythm of the whole composition.

Literati painting's emphasis on description should also include the perfect unity of poem, writing, painting and seal. As the major representation of China's traditional painting, this is where literati paintings are different from green landscape and western painting.

The professional painters, who had been summoned to serve the court in the past, often selected subject matter and adopted styles and techniques to satisfy their royal patrons, while the literati painters, who were amateurs, painted as a means of self-expression, in much the same way as they wrote poetry.

literati, scholars in China and Japan whose poetry, calligraphy, and paintings were supposed primarily to reveal their cultivation and express their personal feelings rather than demonstrate professional skill.