The Catholic missionaries at the Peking Parish court marked the Qing Dynasty of Manchu China in the early Years (primarily the Jesuits) and the emergence of the Sino-European art market. A sign of the times was the appearance of a number of European technologies in Qing art and craft , for example , enamel painting on metal, glass , and porcelain (see Neglinskaya, 2006 (2), pp. 42-52). New genres were also adapted -costume portrait and still life (jingwu-hua). The dialogue between China and Europe of the Enlightenment era gave rise to borderline phenomena in the culture of each side, which found expression in the Chinoiserie phenomenon , and contributed to the emergence of artistic solutions that can only be adequately seen in the mirror of two civilizations. Borderline phenomena include the Qing antique still life "bai gu ", which formed an analogy to the European still life on the theme of vanitas ("vanities/vanities ").

words: Keywords Qing art, antique still life "bai gu", chinoiserie, treasures of the Chinese intellectual wenren, vanitas/vanity.

The Chinese name for the subject genre jing'u-hua ("still nature" or "inanimate objects / quiet things [in] painting") the meaning corresponds to the English (still-life) and German (Stilleben) names derived from the Dutch term of the XVII century still ligende leven ("motionless lying model", "quiet life"). The correspondence itself determines the time of this reception in Chinese art, which coincided with the heyday of the subject genre in the West. (The now widely accepted French term still life, i.e. "dead, inanimate nature", as is well known, did not come into use until the nineteenth century-two centuries later than the genre it denotes.)

The appearance of still life in the Qing Empire reflected a general trend in the court art of countries that fell into the orbit of European interests in the East. Similar attempts were made, for example, in the court painting of Iran (see: [Architecture..., 2011, p. 140-141]). However, in China, the assimilation of European innovations was most meaningful and profound, which was facilitated, on the one hand, by the potential of traditional culture and its readiness to accept Western experience, on the other hand, by the proselytism of Catholic missionaries and the current political situation, in which borrowing from a European source was required to maintain the authority of the ruling Manchu dynasty (for details, see: [Neglinskaya, 2012, pp. 16-22 pp.]). Jesuit missions were active in China for more than a century and a half, from the arrival of Matteo Ricci (1552-1610)to the mid-eighteenth century, when the Qianlong Emperor (1736-1795) issued a special decree "closing" China from the outside world. All this time the missionaries like the Chinese officials served

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Fig. Chinese cloisonne enamel with bai gu theme decoration. Late XIX early XX century (State Museum of Oriental Art, Moscow).

at the Peking court, where they were used as consultants on scientific, military, technological, and even artistic matters.

The adaptation of the still life genre took place as a statement in painted porcelain of the Kangxi period (1662-1722) of the Chinese antique story - " antiquities/one hundred ancient [items]" (bai gu). It should probably be taken into account here that porcelain historically prevailed in Chinese exports, so Kangxi acted as an entrepreneur interested in ensuring that Qing goods meet the modern requirements of the Western art market. At the same time, according to Julia Curtis, this subject, which was used in the painting of Jingdezhen porcelain products around 1690, was due to politics and was a kind of advertisement for Manchu porcelain.

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at home , "a glorious dynasty that promotes Chinese antiquity" (Curtis, 1998, p. 14). The bai gu story quickly spread to various types of Qing arts and crafts (similar works of the 18th century are kept in Western and domestic collections, including the Moscow State Museum of Oriental Art (see: [Kuzmenko, 2009, pp. 25-27, 99-100])). However, being purely Chinese in spirit, the theme of "antiquities"still obscures from the attention of most researchers the very fact that Qing art assimilated innovations of a higher genre level, i.e., the birth of the Chinese still life.

From the Yongzheng period (1723-1735), "antiquities" became a popular theme in court painting. British museums have preserved several scrolls called "Images of Antique Objects" (Guvan-tu, 1728-1729), which are considered parts of the pictorial catalog of collections of the Manchu court [China..., 2005, p.252-255, 430]. "Antiquities" served as an "insert" plot for scenes of court life and portraits, for example, in the painting series "One or Two" (Shi and Shi er, 1740s-1781), depicting the Qianlong Emperor in his study [Wu Hung, 1995, p. 36, fig. 12a, 12b]. Two early versions of this composition are attributed, respectively, to the Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione, a missionary artist at the Peking court (1715-1766), known as Lan Shih-ning, and his Chinese disciple Yao Wen-han, who worked in Beijing after 1743 [Forbidden City..., 2007, p. 90; China..., 2005, R. 439-440]. The antique story, which represented the dynasty and Qing art itself, was equally common in court and export Chinese works of the XVIII-early XX centuries [Neglinskaya, 1995, cat. N 17-25; Neglinskaya, 2006(1), cat. N 106, 125, 128, 141]. The presence of" antiquities"in the decor of Xinjiang carpets [Pictorial carpets..., 2006, p.104, 122-129] and paintings on Korean palace screens ["Wind in Pines"..., 2010, p. 228-233] marked the second wave of plot affirmation in the art of China's neighbors and" vassals". Such artistic borrowing is an attempt by the outlying lands to emulate the latest imperial fashion; it is also an expression of political and cultural loyalty.

The widespread use of the Qing antique subject in the art of China and neighboring countries, the variety of compositional solutions that are more or less representative of the composition of elements, encourage us to understand the question of what is really the content of the "antiquities" - the first Chinese still life. It seems obvious that since its origin in Kangxi period porcelain painting, this story combines several themes of the subject genre. The most permanent of them are: images of antique items themselves (ancient bronze vessels, ritual utensils of the ancestral temple); attributes of fine arts ("four arts" - si shu); and, finally, images of vases or planters with flowers. All three themes exist independently of each other in Qing art.

The antique theme that defined the name bai gu is the semantic dominant of the entire thematically complex plot. It focuses on the origins of the tradition of collecting "antiquities" during the Han Dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD), when ritual bronze lost its dominant role in culture and ancient vessels began to be melted down, but around the same time they began to be studied and collected. So, in the" History of the Han Dynasty " (Han Shu), there is evidence of finding a bronze tripod of the Zhou era (XI-III centuries BC) and delivering it to the capital, where an expert in ancient literature was able to tell about the ritual purpose of the vessel, deciphering the inscription on it (cit. by: [Kryukov, 1988, p. 56]). The tradition of collecting antiquities flourished in the Song (960-1279) and Qing eras. In the Manchu period, by order of Qianlong, multi-volume catalogues of court collections were created, which, as is clear from the preface to one of them written by the emperor himself, followed the model of Kaogu tu ("Illustrated [Collection] of Antiquities", 1092) and

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tu gu bo Xuan-he ("Illustrated [collection] of antiquities of the Xuan-he period", 1119-1126) - catalogues of the Sung period (see: [Qingding Siqing Gujiang, vol. 1, 1889, preface]). The collection of ancient bronze was accompanied by the preservation of the traditional ritual complex and the practice of creating palace and temple utensils of archaeological forms.

A certain semantic contrast to the ancient vessels in the Chinese still life is made up of the so-called treasures of the Chinese intellectual (wenren) - cabinet gizmos or attributes of Si shu -scrolls, brushes, objects for chess games, musical instruments," tools " of creative activity, which symbolize the intelligence of the Far Eastern civilization: they are here and now creating tomorrow's antiquity of Chinese culture and art. Wenren's "Treasures" allow us to see in the antique story a direct analogy to the humanistic still lifes of the European Enlightenment era. A series of attributes of the artist, scientist, and musician, made by the French master of the subject genre J.-B. S. Chardin in 1730-1765, is widely known [Fedotova, 2008, pp. 4-5, 13, 41-43], probably inspired the artist A. Vallier-Coster to create in 1769 the canvas "Attributes of Painting, Sculpture", which is now in the Louvre. and architecture" [Bott, 2010, p. 18]. Still lifes by Chardin and his circle of artists identified the main problems of the aesthetics of the European Enlightenment: the search for harmony between life and art; the affirmation of the importance of education, knowledge and virtue; the problem of the place of the creative personality in society. The attributes of the arts and sciences, which corresponded to the ideology of enlightened absolutism, were even used in European crafts - in the decoration of furniture, fabrics and dishes. These so-called trophies-elegantly arranged object images of a decorative nature-were usually inserted into complex shaped frames-cartouches.

In Qing art, the composition depicting the attributes of Si shu, which was an integral part of the antique plot, could also have an independent meaning like European "trophies". Symbols of the "four arts" decorate, for example, the sides of paired Chinese plates of the XVIII century, decorated in the cloisonne enamel technique [Neglinskaya, 2006(1), N 94, 95]. In this case, the images are grouped in pairs and framed, which increases the similarity of the" tools " of the Chinese intellectual with the semantically similar attributes of Western sciences and arts.

And finally, the last crucial element of Bai gu's composition is a flower vase. This "eternal" image in the art of many peoples in China is historically associated with Buddhism. In the Qing period, a pair of vases, an incense burner (usually shaped like an ancient bronze tripod), and two candlesticks formed the temple altar set of Wu Gong (China..., 2005, p. 138-139). Castiglione, working at the Qing court, created several pictorial scrolls depicting vases, the earliest of which dates back to 1723 [Lan Shih-ning..., 1982, N 1, 43]. The Italian missionary was successfully imitated by Zhang Wei-bang, the author of the still life "Spring Festival" (Sui-zhao tu, circa 1726-1761) [China..., 2005, p. 186, 244, 410, N 82]. A similar motif is already presented in the Song composition "Vase containing flowers [and] herbs" (Tribute to Ping hua Hui), which is attributed to Empress Wu-hou, wife of Emperor Gao-tsung (1127-1162). The image of the vase is accompanied by calligraphy by an unknown court artist on the theme of poems by the Empress, who in turn quotes the poet Fan Cheng-da (1126-1193), an adept of Chan Buddhism [Nan Sun yishu..., 2010, p. 48, ill. 13]. Castiglione could have used this painting, which was kept in the collection of the Peking court, to introduce the mentioned plot into the thematic repertoire of Qing art. For the missionary artist, it probably also mattered that the vase with flowers served as an almost indispensable element of Christian altar compositions and was usually depicted among the offerings to the Virgin Mary in the scene of the "Annunciation" (Wipper, 2005, pp. 203, 220-222, ill. 123-125). In this context, the history of the flower vase motif itself is also noteworthy.

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In the West: inherited from the Greco-Roman era by Christian art, it received an ambivalent interpretation as a symbol of life, both transitory and eternal [Bott, 2010, p.10-11]. The latter circumstance is associated with the presence of flower vases in the compositions of European still lifes on the theme of vanitas, which, as will be shown below, served as Western prototypes of Chinese "antiquities".

The title of the plot vanitas goes back to the statement, the author of which is considered to be the biblical King Solomon: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity "(Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas. Ecclesiastes 1:2). The earliest examples of" vanities " include the painting "Vase with Flowers, Jewelry, coins and Shells" (1606) commissioned by Cardinal Federico Borromeo by the Flemish painter Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625). Here, the combination of luxuriant flowering plants plucked and forming a bouquet, dead shells and golden objects at the foot of the vase pleases the eye and yet reminds of the frailty of life [Bott, 2010: 14-15, 36-37]. The vanitas theme reached its peak of popularity in Dutch painting around the middle of the 17th century. According to the succinct remark of the founder of Russian art criticism B. R. Wipper, "vanities" seemed to prolong the life of the Western Middle Ages, "when something low and vain was seen in matter," and the thing, in order to justify its artistic existence, acquired an allegorical meaning, more weighty in comparison with itself. And even if a thing "could not have any symbolic meaning, a symbol was still imposed on it, and it had to represent the vanity and vanity of life" [Wipper, 2005, pp. 288-290]. Wipper's belief that the" scholastic " theme had a direct impact on the crystallization of the subject genre in Western painting [ibid., pp. 29-35] remains a relevant addition to the popular assessment of vanitas, which is usually seen as a pictorial allegory inspired by Baroque art by post-medieval theology and inevitably absorbed the mood of the era of bloody wars and plague epidemics.

It is now clear that the Western still life of vanitas illustrates the mental changes that took place in the European culture of the 16th and 17th centuries against the background of the rise of Protestantism (with its revision of sacred objects and the form of their veneration) and the beginning of the transformation of biblical hermeneutics from an "exegetical art" - according to Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) - to one of the philosophy [Sokolov, 2012, p. 230-231]. Vanitas 'compositions are a pictorial allusion to the theme of" common places " (loci communes) in the compendiums of Protestant authors, which combined the main sacred subjects (the creation of the world, the incarnation and earthly life of Christ) with the main themes of logical theology (the Creator, the laws of nature, sin and death), presented simultaneously in chronological and logical sequence. Speaking literally as an "exegetical art", "vanities" denoted a period of internal polarization in biblical exegesis, a polarization that resulted from the illegitimate use of the rationalistic (developed for the "secularized" sciences) method of Rene Descartes (1596-1650) in the interpretation of Holy Scripture.

Researchers of European painting unanimously note that, firstly, the paintings of the XVII century as a whole have hidden symbolism, making them involved in reflections on the theme of vanitas. Secondly, the compositions of "vanities", without being constant, necessarily include symbols of the impermanence of life - a skull and its equivalents, such as sea shells, as well as symbols of time or the transience of life - images of clocks and flower bouquets [Danilova, 2007, pp. 64-67]. Third, the theme of "vanities" was often extended to the attributes of various occupations (sciences, arts, and even the military arts) associated with humanity's desire for precarious earthly glory. (Still lifes of the Enlightenment period are especially characterized by the attributes of the sciences and arts, but there are also attributes of missionary work.) Finally, "vanities" and the genre of still life itself reflect the dilemma animatedly-

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go and inanimate ("living" and "dead"), combining lifeless and "living things". However, once in the still life, living things (for example, flowers) are removed from the natural environment, their natural expediency, and placed "in a new expediency - transforming, rearranging human hands" (Wipper, 2005, p.68). Thus, the compositions of the subject genre in general and vanitas in particular indicated, on the one hand, the polarization in the visual arts of the phenomena of living and dead nature, on the other-the transformative role of human creative activity.

This polarization of the concepts of" living "and" dead " is at the heart of the Jesuit polemic on the embedding of intentional qualities, called the "argument from the stone". In the course of discussing what the act of putting divine energy "into someone else's intellect, someone else's sensing ability, or even into a completely unsuitable substrate - a log or stone" gives, the Jesuits of the XVII century formulated the thesis about the "word of the mind" - a living thought, an intimate product of human consciousness. They came to the conclusion that it is wrong to interpret creativity in terms of subjectivity (this would mean "irreparably reducing the very understanding of a person") and turned to the concepts of personality and personal being [Vdovina, 2012, p.196, 218-221]. The result achieved in the course of the controversy determined the conscious appeal of the representatives of this order to the intellect and personal principle of a person in educational and missionary activities.

I think we can see in the theme of vanitas a reflection of the deep contradictions of the European worldview of the early Modern period. Marking the period of theoretical battles between philosophy and secular sciences for independence from theology, the era of the formation of the philosophical concept of personality, this plot appeals not only to the "rearranging hand" of the artist, but to a greater extent - to the power of his transforming intellect, capable of playing with Christian and other general cultural symbols in an attempt to stimulate the movement of the viewer's And this, perhaps, is the main difference between "vanities" and other varieties of European still life of the XVII century.

The special role of vanitas in the Baroque culture was probably the reason for the transfer of the plot to Qing art. The Jesuits who served the emperors of China were "the most influential and dynamic intellectual force in post-medieval scholasticism" (Vdovina, 2012, p. 197). More interested than anyone else in the success of proselytizing among the Chinese population, the Jesuits had the opportunity to adapt vanities, the only subject matter related to theology, during the reign of their Christian - loyal pupil, the Kangxi Emperor. The fact that they used their chance to translate vanitas into the visual language of the Chinese and get the bai gu plot at the same time is indicated by the methodological similarity of this artistic "translation" with the Jesuit mission's approach to solving the problem of adapting the ideas of Catholicism in the Celestial Empire adopted since the time of Matteo Ricci.

It is known that the Ricci method was a method of Christian reading of early Confucianism, which in the minds of Chinese speakers was associated with the sacred concept of "antiquity". This approach seems to be logically conditioned: the founder of the Jesuit mission saw the possibility of bringing the adaptable Christian doctrine closer to the moral and ethical teachings of Confucius in order to" restore "monotheism in China," lost " by neo-Confucianism. Ricci's mission program followed the general principles of Jesuit theology, which adapted to the mores and customs of converts (theologia accommodativa) and in order to optimize the result, combining the capabilities of different cognitive systems (in the context of China - Confucianism, Aristotelianism, and Early Modern Western theology). The effectiveness of this approach is confirmed not only by the ability of new Chinese converts to accept Ricci's argument and support the idea of additional education.-

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However, it is also a series of successful receptions in Chinese art (see Neglinskaya, 2012, pp. 151-336).

Jesuit artists who worked in China at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries were able to use the imaginative potential of Buddhism (the main competitor of Christianity in finding a solution to the existential problem), including the image of a "Buddhist" flower vase (by analogy with the same Christian motif) in the composition of bai gu. The principle of choosing symbolic correspondences between elements of the vanitas plot and Chinese "antiquities" seems to have prompted missionaries to present images of ancient ritual vessels (associated with rites of ancestral worship, a traditional Chinese practice that is equivalent to serving the historical memory of the culture itself) as the figurative equivalent of a skull (symbolizing for missionaries the entire spiritual history of mankind from the " old man"Adam to the" new Adam " - Christ).

This iconographic metamorphosis, which visually indicates the early stage of perception of Catholicism in China, answers the question: why the inspiration for the Chinese still life could not be representatives of other Christian missions. The answer is obvious: only theologia accommodativa allowed Chinese adherents to venerate Confucius and their ancestors, and thus the Jesuit missionaries, according to A. V. Lomanov, really " sought the ancient, reasonable and compatible with Christianity meaning of these rituals." The Jesuits 'willingness to deeply Sinicize Christianity aroused concern and jealousy among representatives of other missions, who initiated a controversy known as the" dispute about Chinese rituals", which lasted for many decades and was closed in 1704 by the Vatican's ban on the participation of Christians in the ceremonies of worship of Confucius and his ancestors (Lomanov, 2007, p.310).

Illustrating the missionary method of the Jesuits, " antiquities "are a characteristic phenomenon of the Qing culture, in which innovations of Western origin were just as purposefully selected for traditional correspondences, which made it possible to" clothe "borrowed phenomena in the" clothes " of Chinese archaism.

Summing up, I will note that due to historical circumstances, the phenomenon of Qing antique still life represents in an idealized form two traditions - Chinese and European-Mediterranean and unites two goals-missionaries and the ruling dynasty. The Kangxi Emperor, who inspired and ordered the Qing style, sought to preserve the Chinese cultural tradition and renew it by appropriating modern Western achievements. The artists-missionaries who carried out the order, following the will of the monarch, also remembered their strategic tasks. Under these circumstances, the vanities, faithfully translated into the language of the Chinese tradition, were reborn as the hundred Ancients, and although the original plot of vanitas changed beyond recognition in the process of reincarnation, its Western structure was well preserved in the Qing version. At the same time," antiquities "turned out to be the opposite of" vanities " in terms of mood.

Vanitas ' still life shows an intellectual and emotional juxtaposition of images of the "living" (flowers) and the "dead" (skull, shells - "shells" from which life has passed away). This was not the case in the Qing still life, whose semantic core was archaic ritual vessels, which in Chinese culture have the meaning of a link between its past and present, which was possible in the conditions of preserving the traditional state ritual and the corresponding forms of ritual utensils. In bai gu, the tragic worldview embodied in vanitas disappeared: "antiquities" preserved the idea of eternal life of the autochthonous tradition.

The bai gu plot has acquired the same significance in Chinese art as vanitas in European art: both of them celebrate the birth of the subject genre (still life) and mark the transition state (each of them-its own) culture.

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