EXCEPTION TO THE RULE: HOW ADAPTATION GENIUS MATTEO RICCI FAILED TO UNDERSTAND CHINESE PAINTING

The article looks into an interesting case of artistic accommodation, which for a number of reasons did not happen during the time of the leader and one of the founders of the Jesuit mission in China, Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), a successful preacher and author of the so called ‘Matteo Ricci Rules’, justifying the need to adapt missionary activities and preaching to the beliefs, traditions and culture of the host country. The author proposes for her analysis two opposite figures — the Chinese Jesuit of the second generation, provincial landscape painter Wu Li (1632–1718) and Italian painter who worked at the court of the emperors of the Manchu Qing dynasty Giuseppe Castiglione (Lan Shining; 1688–1766), trying to show the long way of the adaptation of artistic techniques from the time of the mission’s founder Matteo Ricci, who did not accept and did not understand Chinese painting, and Wu Li, who did not see the value of European painting, to Lan Shining and his patrons, the Qing emperors, who created a sophisticated ‘Occidentalist’ style, combining features of Western and Chinese painting. The author concludes that Matteo Ricci, even though he used visual materials in his sermons as an aid to verbal preaching, missed the great opportunity of preaching through the brush, while Giuseppe Castiglione and his colleagues, European masters working at court, essentially continued to use ‘Ricci’s Rules’ and the accommodative method of preaching through the adaptation of European painting techniques to the Chinese ones, using the appropriate direct wishes and orders of the crowned representatives of the non-Chinese dynasty.