The Lyrical Resonance Between Chinese Poets and Painters: The Tra ...

content of the murals to philosophize on the natural and human world while also commenting on the way things were painted. Such a mode of representation serves as a precursor to the poetics of tihuashi that was to be established almost a millennium later.

Wang's hypothesis on the authorial motivation behind the Tian wen may have been based on the practices of huaming and huazan in his own time, both of which were written in the siyan form, much like the Song (Hymns and eulogies) in the Shi jing (Classic of poetry), or The Book of Songs. Despite their formal resemblance to the poems in the Shi jing, both huaming and huazan remain essentially different from tihuashi because of their lack of a poetic language or theme.⁸ Though they link writing to painting, their subject matter is neither painting nor a painter proper but rather the things or people painted. Still, huaming and huazan may be considered prototypes of tihuashi given that many tihuashi are written in praise of a painting or its painter (or both) in a eulogistic style, and the practice of huazan actually continued into the Tang period and beyond.

In his Lidai minghua ji (A record of famous paintings from past dynasties), the Tang scholar Zhang Yanyuan (ca. 815-ca. 875) noted that Emperor Ming (Liu Zhuang, reign 58-75) of the Eastern Han dynasty (25-220) had a refined taste for painting and decreed the installation of additional huashi (literally, studio), which became the prototypical model of the painting academy of later times.⁹ According to Zhang, Emperor Ming also had additional positions of huaguan (literally, painting official) installed and commissioned erudite scholar-officials-such as Ban Gu (32-92) and Jia Kui (30-101)-to select historical events from all the classics.¹⁰ He then ordered the painting clerks to paint illustrations of those events, a practice also called huazan, which can be considered eulogies in a pictorial form.¹¹ Zhang also mentioned that Emperor Ling (reign 168-189) ordered the Eastern Han scholar-official Cai Yong (132-192) to paint the portraits of generals and ministers of five generations from the family of Marquis Chiquan, write zan (eulogies) for those portraits, and then inscribe them in calligraphy.¹² Cai was well known in his time for his skills in calligraphy, painting, and eulogies on painting-which were called the “three beauties.”¹³