Ritual Painting

Ritual Painting, Western Han Dynasty, painted silk, unearthed from Tomb No. 3 in Mawangdui, Changsha, Hunan Province, collection of Hunan Provincial Museum. This painting is approximately 1 meter wide and 2 meters long, originally hung on the inner wall of the outer coffin. The coffin in the tomb symbolizes the "residence" of the deceased. Therefore, the symbolic meaning of the coffin is closely related to the content depicted on the silk painting hung on the coffin wall: a grand procession of chariots, horses and ceremonial teams, as well as the leisurely life of aristocratic families, which actually records the life of the deceased before death. The artist who created the "Ritual Painting" inherited and developed this tradition by arranging and combining the layered characters. Distant figures face the viewer, middle-range figures are portrayed in profile, and close-range figures are depicted only from behind. Although no perspective techniques are used, the spatiality of the composition is still conveyed.

This piece is compiled from the Chinese edition of Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting by Foreign Languages Press and Yale University Press, translated by Chen Ying.