The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Gu Kaizhi (attributed) · Nüshi zhen tu, Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies · handscroll, ink and colour on silk, read from right to left · nine scenes illustrating a text by the statesman and poet Zhang Hua (232 to 300), each scene preceded by its passage of the text written on the silk; the opening scenes of the sequence lost · attributed to Gu Kaizhi (about 344 to about 406), the scroll now generally held to be a later copy or a work in his manner, its date disputed between the late fifth and the eighth century · the British Museum, London · the unit scored is the London scroll as it now stands, whoever made it; the later colophons, seals and remounting weighed under survival only
Mode
Exemplary illustration in a handscroll: text and scene alternating, precept and then case, each scene one moment of conduct
Mythos
The law that what rises must fall, built as a mountain between sun and moon; the mirror as the oldest figure of self-knowledge; the loyal and the modest consort of exemplary history
Phase
Made for a court, by a hand and at a date not known; attributed to Gu Kaizhi, now generally held to be later; the first scenes lost, the silk worn, the scroll remounted
Presentation
Ink and colour on silk, colour sparing, chiefly red in ribbons and robes; a horizontal scroll unrolled by one reader at a table, an arm’s width at a time
Register
Grace and decorum, with one moment of danger and several of quiet doubt; restraint as the manner of every figure
Scale
The interior of one palace and the conduct of its women; nine scenes at the scale of the hand
Governing Proposition
A long silk scroll, unrolled a stretch at a time from the right, sets out a text of admonition to the women of a court, passage by passage, and after each passage a scene. A lady steps between an emperor and a bear; a lady declines his palanquin; a mountain stands with the sun and moon at its sides; a woman looks at her face in a mirror; an emperor sits on the edge of a curtained bed and turns his head. The wager of the scroll is that a precept about inward virtue and fickle favour can be given bodies, and that a single even line can show courage, doubt and refusal as relations between people at the instant of choice.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work is the handscroll in the British Museum known as Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies, in Chinese Nüshi zhen tu: ink and colour on silk, read from right to left. It illustrates, scene by scene, a text by the statesman and poet Zhang Hua (232 to 300), a set of admonitions addressed to the women of the court, and before each scene its passage of the text is written on the silk, so that text and image alternate down the length of the scroll.
The scroll is attributed to Gu Kaizhi (about 344 to about 406). It is now generally held to be a later copy or a work in his manner, dated by different scholars anywhere between the late fifth and the eighth century. The question is not settled here, and nothing is credited to Gu that the scroll does not show. What is scored is the painting as it stands in London, whoever made it. A monochrome version on paper in the Palace Museum, Beijing, is context and is not scored; so are the colophons, seals and inscriptions added by later owners, the Qianlong emperor’s among them, and the remounting, which bear on survival alone.
Nine scenes survive. The text is generally held to have been illustrated in twelve, and the first three are lost from this scroll, so that it now opens partway into the admonition. In order, the nine are: Lady Feng placing herself between the Han emperor Yuan and an escaped bear; Lady Ban declining to ride with the emperor in his palanquin; a mountain with the sun and moon, birds and beasts, and a kneeling archer aiming at it; the toilette; the bed; the family; the rejection; a lady kneeling alone in reflection; and the Instructress writing on a scroll while two court ladies approach her. A copy, if it is one, is charged nowhere but where it costs the evidence of the swerve and the measure of reach.
Movement II
The scroll as it now stands opens on its one act of courage. A bear has escaped and is already on the slope of the dais. Lady Feng steps forward between it and the emperor, a woman with nothing in her hands. Two guards with raised spears close on the beast; the emperor draws back; the other consorts are in flight. Each figure is a term in a comparison of courage, and none can be taken out without the comparison failing. This is the scroll’s one moment of danger, and it is real.
The next scene is its opposite in kind. Lady Ban declines to ride with the emperor in his palanquin: modesty, not daring, the favour of a seat beside the emperor refused. Together the two scenes set out the exemplary history on which the admonition rests, the loyal consort and the modest consort of the Han, and they do it in figures that act. These people turn, hesitate, step forward and refuse.
That is the scroll’s departure from what it inherits. The illustration of exemplary women was old, in the Lienü zhuan tradition, in tomb painting, and in such objects as the lacquered screen from the tomb of Sima Jinlong, where like subjects are set out in labelled registers. There the figure has a place. Here it has weight and motion, and stands in a space with some depth. How far that turn was this scroll’s own cannot be known: the painting of the fourth and fifth centuries is largely lost, and maker, date and commission are unknown, so the departure is measured on what can be seen and with a wide margin.
Movement III
In the toilette a lady sits before a mirror on its stand, and her face is shown in it; beside her another has her hair dressed. The passage of text over the scene sets adorning the face against adorning the nature. The painting does not argue the point. It shows the face twice, once turned toward the glass and once looking back out of it, and leaves the viewer to see that what the mirror shows is not what the text asks to be adorned. The mirror is the oldest figure of self-knowledge, and here it is built into the composition rather than alluded to.
In the bed scene the emperor sits on the edge of a curtained bed, not in it, and turns his head toward a woman within, whose face is withheld. The text beside it concerns the good or ill of words spoken in private. The curtains, the half-turned body and the hidden face are the whole of the doubt: doubt drawn as posture, between two people, without a word. In the rejection the emperor turns away from a woman with a gesture of refusal, and favour becomes a matter of a hand.
These are the scroll’s disclosures: self-regard under observation, doubt, and the withdrawal of favour, made visible as relations between people. They hold outside the palace. The meaning is the text’s, and the image sharpens and enacts it rather than originating it; exemplary illustration discloses its precept more than a condition found. Within that limit the painting states more than its words, and the question of how far it merely illustrates them, and how far it quietly ironises them, is one the literature has not closed.
Movement IV
Between the public exempla and the private chambers stands the mountain. The sun is at one side and the moon at the other; birds and beasts are on its slopes; a kneeling archer aims at it from below. It illustrates the turn of fortune, the law that what rises must fall, and it states that law as an image of the cosmos. It stands at the centre of the scroll, its hinge.
It is the scroll’s one attempt at grandeur, and its drawing is archaic. The archer is as large as the slope; the space follows an older convention than the rooms, which have depth where the mountain has none. The effect is emblem more than awe. That is the measure of the scroll’s elevation as a whole: grace of one register, recurring in the ribbons and trains of every court lady, lifted once by danger and reaching once for the cosmic, with no terror held and no transport by size.
Yet the mountain obeys the scroll’s law. Everywhere else conduct is shown at the instant of choice, in one restrained line, so that the lady before the bear and the lady kneeling alone in reflection, the farthest apart in kind, are drawn in the same voice. The mountain says as cosmos what the scenes say as conduct. Only its drawing resists, as the crowding of the family scene does, an emperor or lord among his consorts and many children placed to illustrate a line about descendants.
Movement V
The scroll ends on its own author. The Instructress sits writing on a scroll, and two court ladies walk toward her, the scroll’s purest grace in their trailing ribbons. The text closes: “女史司箴，敢告庶姬”
“The Instructress who has charge of admonition ventures to address the court ladies.” The reader who has unrolled the whole arrives at the one who addressed it, and the admonition is shown in the act of being made.
This is knowledge the form makes. The handscroll is unrolled an arm’s width at a time by one reader at a table, so that each passage of text comes first and then its case, in an order the hand controls: the way an admonition is received. The line is the second form. It is fine, even and unbroken, without swelling or pressure, and it holds the sweep of a ribbon and the turn of a sleeve with one tension; faces of one type are set with glances that carry the drama, and sparing red leads the eye along. It makes every figure equally present and equally restrained, which is the decorum the text asks for. Screen and album carried the same subjects, with a loss of sequence more than of knowledge.
The scroll lived in a few collections and was seen by few. Its reach ran through the reputation of Gu’s manner, through copies, and through the line revived in the plain drawing of later masters; as the founding object of the history of Chinese painting it is real and late, more emblem and evidence than a redirection of practice. The silk is worn and abraded, retouched and remounted, and the opening is gone. The Tale of Genji Scrolls (8.4), the nearest kind, a damaged handscroll of court life alternating text and picture, stands above it, and the Song handscroll Along the River During the Qingming Festival (8.7) above that, on a fuller command of space. What survives here is nine scenes and their texts, legible, ending where the admonition is written.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged scene by scene and across the scroll. Within a scene little can be taken away. In the bear scene the beast, the lady stepping forward, the two guards with raised spears and the emperor drawing back while the other consorts flee make one event, each figure a term in a comparison of courage. In the bed scene the curtains, the emperor half turned and the woman’s withheld face are the whole of the doubt. The toilette needs its mirror: the face seen twice is the precept. What yields is the sequence. The scroll is a run of illustrations to a text, and its losses have shown it: the nine stand without the opening scenes, and the order could take one more or one fewer. The family scene is the most permitted, a crowd placed to illustrate a line.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Something can be stated, and the painting states more than its text. The precept is that virtue is inward and favour fickle, and the scroll gives it bodies. The toilette scene sets a face beside its reflection and leaves the viewer to see that what the mirror shows is not what the text asks to be adorned. The bed scene renders doubt between two people without a word: the emperor sits on the edge, not in, and turns his head. The rejection makes favour a matter of a hand, and the bear scene shows courage as a woman stepping where armed men hold back. These hold outside the palace. Held below the upper band because the meaning is the text’s, which the image sharpens and enacts but does not originate.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The lowest of the twelve. The elevation is grace, of one register, and it recurs: the fluttering ribbons and long trains of the court ladies, drawn with one unbroken even line, give every figure a lift that is almost flight, and the two ladies walking toward the Instructress at the end are its purest instance. The bear scene is the one moment of danger, and it is real: a beast already on the slope of the dais, a woman with nothing in her hands. What holds the axis is range and kind. The mountain reaches for the cosmic, but its scale is archaic, the archer as large as the slope, and the effect is emblem more than awe. There is no terror held and no transport by size, and much of the scroll is a quiet decorum whose beauty is that of manner.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Mostly evoked, built in two places. The mountain carries the law the text states, that what rises must fall, as an image of the cosmos: sun and moon at either side, creatures on the slopes, a hunter aiming from below. That is structure, not allusion, and it stands at the centre of the sequence as its hinge between the public exempla and the private chambers. The mirror is the oldest figure of self-knowledge, and the toilette scene builds it into the composition, the reflected face turned toward the viewer. Elsewhere the archetypes are summoned through exemplary history: the loyal consort, the modest consort, the Instructress as the voice of the law itself. The particulars stay particular. But exempla are a moral pattern more than a myth, and the scroll’s deepest structure is a list.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The inheritance is the illustration of exemplary women, known from the Lienü zhuan tradition, from tomb painting, and from such objects as the lacquered screen from the tomb of Sima Jinlong, where similar subjects are set out in registers with labels. The departure is in what the figure does: these figures turn, hesitate, step forward and refuse; they stand in a room or before a bed with some depth, and the line gives them weight and motion where the tradition gave them place. The alternation of text and scene along one scroll, read in sequence, is itself an achievement of the form. The stake cannot be stated: maker, date and commission are unknown, and the painting of the period is so largely lost that the measure of the departure rests on what happens to survive.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Substitute a different form and much goes. The handscroll is unrolled an arm’s width at a time, so the viewer meets each passage of text and then its scene, precept and then case, in an order the hand controls. That is how an admonition is received: in turn, at the pace of reading, by one person at a table. The form lets the scroll end on its own author: the last scene shows the Instructress writing, the admonition in the act of being made, so that the reader who has unrolled the whole arrives at the one who addressed it. The line is a second form, an even stroke that makes every figure equally present and equally restrained, which is the decorum the text asks for. Held below the top because screen and album carried the same subjects with loss of sequence more than of knowledge.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Evidence over promise: the scroll has been examined for centuries by connoisseurs and in the last century by a large literature, and the questions remain open. Its date, and whether it is a copy, a work in a manner, or something nearer to Gu. The relation of image to text: whether the painting illustrates the precepts, reinterprets them or quietly ironises them, above all in the bed and rejection scenes. The mountain: its meaning, its archaic space, and what it tells of early landscape. The writing of the text panels and its date. The later history of seals and imperial additions, as a history of how a canon is made. The surface yields on return too: a ribbon’s turn, a glance. Held below the top because much of the literature concerns attribution and provenance rather than depths in the image.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The field is Chinese figure painting of its own centuries. The intrinsic force: the scroll is the earliest surviving handscroll in which figures act on one another in spaces with some depth, in a line of even tension that later became a named type of brushwork, and it gives Gu Kaizhi’s recorded aim, conveying the spirit through the form, a body that can be pointed to. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the scroll lived in a few collections and was seen by few, so its effect on later painters ran through the reputation of Gu’s manner, through copies, the Beijing version among them, and through the line revived in the plain drawing of later masters. Its reach as the founding object of the history of Chinese painting is real and late, more emblem and evidence than redirection of practice.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across well over a millennium. Form: the opening scenes are lost, by the usual count three of twelve, about a quarter of the sequence and with it the start of the admonition; the nine that remain are legible and keep the end, the Instructress, which carries the form’s meaning. That is a real charge. Presence: continuous in Chinese collections for many centuries, valued and inscribed by emperors, the Qianlong emperor among them, but private and rarely unrolled; in the modern period central to the study of Chinese painting, and still rarely shown. Fame lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: silk worn and abraded, with losses, retouching and a remounting; the smallest charge where the form is legible. The loss of scenes and the fragility of the silk place it in the lower part of the range for centuries with loss.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Judged as command of ink and colour on silk at the scale of the hand, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the scroll’s restraint and its grace are the line’s. The stroke is fine, even and unbroken, with no swelling or pressure, and it holds the long sweep of a trailing ribbon and the small turn of a sleeve with the same tension. Faces are drawn with a few strokes and set with glances that carry the drama, above all in the bed and rejection scenes. Colour is sparing, chiefly red accents in ribbons and robes, placed to lead the eye along. The costs are charged: the mountain’s space and scale are archaic, the figures out of proportion to the slope; the family scene is crowded and flat; and the faces are of one type.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the bear scene, an event of danger in the public court, and the lady kneeling alone in reflection, an inward act with no event at all. One law governs both: conduct is shown at the instant of choice, and the line gives every figure the same restraint, so that courage and contemplation are drawn in one voice. The mountain, the farthest in kind, obeys the same law, stating as cosmos what the scenes state as conduct, and the Instructress at the end gathers the whole into the act of admonition. The range is real: public and private, danger and intimacy, the cosmic and the cosmetic. What resists is the mountain’s drawing, which follows an older spatial convention than the rooms, and the family scene, whose crowding obeys the text more than the scroll’s manner.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The orders held: the state, in the emperor, his favour and the safety of the throne; the court as a society, with its ranks, guards and rituals; the family and lineage, in the scene of descendants; the moral life of women as the subject of the text; the self, in the mirror and the kneeling lady; history, in the exemplary consorts of the Han; and the cosmic order, in the mountain with its sun and moon. They are integrated by the text’s argument and by the single line, and the mountain makes the tie of conduct to cosmos explicit. What holds the axis is the form and the lens: everything is seen from inside the palace and through precept, there is no labour and almost no nature outside the emblem, and the orders are named by example more than held in one structure. The figure describes the form.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.8, then The Made at 8.6 and The Bottomless Well at 8.3. A form legible after well over a millennium that keeps its end though it has lost its opening; a line fine, even and unbroken that carries the scroll’s restraint and its grace; and a literature of centuries that has not closed the questions of date, of maker and of how far the painting reads its text.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 7.3: grace of one register, recurring, with one real moment of danger and a mountain whose archaic scale makes it emblem more than awe. Then The Encompassed at 7.4, many orders named by example and seen from inside the palace, and The Swerve at 7.5, a departure from the illustration of exemplary women that can be seen but whose stake cannot be stated, against a painting of its age largely lost.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.7 against a threshold of 7.5, by two tenths. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.2, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 8.8 clears the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.2, The Unconcealment at 7.9, The Archetypal Deep at 7.6 and The Swerve at 7.5 fall short of it, the reach late and run through reputation and copies, the meaning the text’s, the myth mostly evoked, the stake unknown. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.3, below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 95.7, an average of 7.975 that displays 8.0, at the foot of Tier IV and far below the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the handscroll in the British Museum, London, Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies (Nüshi zhen tu), attributed to Gu Kaizhi, and of the published literature on it: well as to its scenes, their order, its line and its history; less well as to brushwork and pigment, known from reproduction and the literature rather than from long study of the silk, so that where a judgment turns on the making it is held more loosely. The work scored is the London scroll as it now stands: nine scenes, each with its passage of Zhang Hua’s text written on the silk. The attribution is context, not the unit; the scroll’s date and its status as a copy or a work in Gu’s manner are disputed and are stated as disputed. The loss of the opening scenes, the wear and retouching of the silk, the remounting and the later colophons, seals and inscriptions are weighed on The Imperishable only. The monochrome version in the Palace Museum, Beijing, and the screen from the tomb of Sima Jinlong enter as context and are credited on no axis. The only words quoted are the closing lines of Zhang Hua’s text, in the original, with the desk’s own English beneath; the passage over the toilette scene is given in substance, not quoted. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the dimensions of the scroll, the date and occasion of Zhang Hua’s text and the person it was first aimed at, which scenes the lost opening held and whether the Beijing version preserves them and of what date that version is, the date of the tomb screen, the scroll’s owners before the eighteenth century, when and how it left China and came to the British Museum, the date of the remounting and the conditions of its display, the later name for its line, and the scholarly occasions devoted to it.