I didn’t see this object, a painting on silk, because it’s too fragile and they don’t keep it out in the light. But MacGregor describes a fascinating piece that illustrates the relationship between artist and patron, courtier and ruler, as developed in Confucian China. Not long after the Han dynasty crumbled, a mentally deficient emperor was controlled by his unscrupulous wife and her powerful clan; one of her ministers, mandarins, I guess, wrote a poem for her describing the proper way for a woman to behave. That Confucian thing of ‘just set a good example;’ the poem wasn’t a direct criticism, and it doesn’t sound as though the poet was killed. Some time later, the leadership was in a similar situation; an emperor’s 30 year-old wife murdered him the night he joked about dumping her for someone younger. Pictures speak louder than words, apparently, so the response from the courtiers was this admonitions scroll, a painting admonishing the leading ladies of the kingdom to behave properly, and offering examples. The one MacGregor describes is evidently based on something that really happened: a traveling zoo or circus is exhibiting a bear to the emperor, but it gets loose and terrifies everyone. Two of the emperor’s wives are cringing, uselessly, as is the emperor himself; but the good wife has thrown herself between the bear and the emperor. Why can’t you all behave more like that?
MacGregor doesn’t tell us what happened to the painter. (Or, if this object were like the lacquer cup above, the team that created the painting.) The story does beg the question, though, about the proper relationship between leader and courtier, which has very often turned into patron and artist. Many 18th-century European operas, which are largely obsessed with defining the difference between a good ruler and a tyrant, are unperformable today (or at least, difficult for a modern audience to care about) because they’re basically propaganda for whoever paid for the original production. Artists flatter patrons, the way courtiers flatter those whose court they’re in. I’ve found there’s a very curious, always evasive balance, in a court (in my own way I’m an advisor to a person in power) because the courtier wants to be close to the leader, and yet wants to be independent; wants the leader to like him and prefer to have him around, yet wants the leader to respect his integrity and listen to him when he’s admonishing the leader. Plus, there are (or should be) multiple courtiers, and I don’t see any way for them not to be engaging in petty jealousies and rivalries and jockying for power among each other. It’s easier in a situation like that in Turandot, where the three ministers, Ping, Pang, and Pong, are a three-headed hydra, virtually indistinguishable from each other. On the other hand, the tyrant-princess hasn’t listened to anything they’ve said in years.
One other fun thing about the admonitions scroll is its midrash of commentors. MacGregor points out that, although it’s been around a long time, only the elite of the elite ever got a chance to view it; and many of them left comments on it, the way a little bit of the Torah gets midrash, commentaries surrounding it by the generations of rabbis. (Although in the case of the Torah, the original work is reproducible, unlike the Admonitions Scroll.) It does remind me of a trail of Facebook comments left on a posted photo...although one might hope the comments here are a bit more valuable, in terms of semantic significance, than those left on your typical Facebook post.
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