Riding the wind of rebirth

Chapter 1761 A Better Way

However, complexity has its advantages, because the lines of the wooden mold are carved using the incised line technique, so the strokes on the pressed bricks protrude from the brick surface.

What the Jinling Museum has transmitted now is an ink rubbing with very clear and distinct lines. Unlike the black background and white text in the intaglio ink rubbing, this brick painting rubbing is similar to the traditional painting, with a white background and black lines.

Of course, after two mold re-moldings, the lines will become rougher, similar to modern prints, and it is impossible to be as fine as brush strokes, but the overall composition and lines are still preserved intact.

The painting adopts the scattered perspective method, inheriting the previous painting tradition, with skillful techniques and smooth lines. The eight figures are all sitting on the ground, with well-proportioned proportions, free postures and vivid expressions.

The upper part of the brick and stone picture depicts Ji Kang, Ruan Ji, Shan Tao and Wang Rong, while the lower part depicts Xiang Xiu, Liu Ling, Ruan Xian and Rong Qiqi.

Each figure is decorated with plants such as green pine, broad-leaved bamboo, and ginkgo.

Rong Qiqi lived about a thousand years apart from the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove. Rong Qiqi was active in the Spring and Autumn Period and it is said that he had contacts with Confucius. It is certainly impossible for him to sit and drink with the Seven Sages. Putting him in the same painting is intended to regard him as a role model, but mainly to balance the picture.

The style of the figures is an indication of the character style that was popular in the Southern Dynasties, that is, the image of elegant and famous people with loose clothes, wide belts, slender bones and clear figures, and the style characteristics of purity, exquisiteness, slenderness and elegance.

Although it is far inferior to painting, the lines of the sculpture are strong and flowing, with both form and spirit, which makes up for the loss of many details.

At least in the field of brick and stone portraits, it is truly worthy of the title of "Masterpiece of the Six Dynasties".

Because the portrait was very clear, Zhou Zhi knew at a glance that it was the same original as the painting he had in his hand. All the large lines and visible parts were exactly the same.

For example, the figures are separated by ginkgo, pine, locust and weeping willow. Another example is that the eight people are sitting on the ground, and each of them presents a posture that best reflects their personality, which fully expresses the ideal personality of the free and noble intellectuals of the gentry, and the image can completely overlap with the part that can still be discerned in the scroll.

There is an allusion about the Seven Sages, called "Ji Qin Ruan Xiao". In this brick painting, Ruan Ji leans sideways and whistles with his mouth, obviously looking like he is stammering and forgetting himself. Shan Tao is a drunkard, and there is a record of "drinking until eight buckets of wine before getting drunk", so he is holding a wine bowl in the painting, while Wang Rong dances with a ruyi in his hand, bare legs, and specially matched with a money box, with a lazy and leisurely posture.

Here is a detail. Wang Rong hated money the most. Ordinary paintings of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove would never show a money box for him. If there was a money box, Wang Rong would probably have an expression of disgust as if he was waving a fly. This painting is very special, as it depicts Wang Rong as if he doesn't care at all.

  In fact, this may be the deeper meaning that the painter wants to express. The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove were pursuing freedom of mind. Even the body cannot become a shackle, so how can they be shackled by external things?

And there is another detail here. The Ruyi in Wang Rong's hand is really a tickler, with a small hand in front and a straight long pole in the back. Combined with the way Wang Rong holds it, at first glance you might think it is an old man smoking a pipe, but only if you look closely will you find that it is an "Old Man's Toy".

This image is impossible to appear in paintings of later generations. The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove were people who pondered profound principles, claimed to be elegant, had their qin and zither at their sides, and were obsessed with poetry and wine. How could they possibly have fun with an old man?

Therefore, in later literati paintings, Ruyi became a thing shaped like Ganoderma lucidum, and the shadow of Lao Toule could no longer be seen.

Anyway, except for this one, Zhou Zhi has never seen any other picture of a hermit holding a ruyi in which the ruyi in his hand is in the shape of an old man.

Another equally unique instrument is Ruan Xian. Ruan Xian was well versed in music and was good at playing the pipa. Of course, the so-called "pipa" here is very different from the pipa today. This plucked instrument was directly called "ruanqin" in later generations, and playing the ruanqin has an elegant name called "playing ruan".

Because "ruan" and "yue" are very similar in ancient Chinese, people later changed the name of this instrument to the "yueqin" that we are familiar with now. However, this change also happened gradually. Yueqin was not widely known until after the Song and Ming Dynasties. In the Seven Sages of the Tang Dynasty, Ruan Xian often held the Western Region Pipa, which was recognized by everyone in the Tang Dynasty. This is because the painters were not well educated and were influenced by the secular name.

These details are clear evidence that the brick painting and silk painting came from the same book, and also evidence that the painting book came from the Southern and Northern Dynasties, which was very close to the Eastern Jin Dynasty. The painter was very familiar with the things of the Jin Dynasty, unlike later painters who used their imagination based on historical allusions and texts and were then misled by the secular world.

Of course, there is not no difference at all.

First of all, although the characters and the trees behind them are the same, their order has been adjusted.

In Zhou Zhi's scroll, the characters on the picture are arranged in the following order: Rong Qiqi, Ji Kang, Ruan Ji, Shan Tao, Xiang Xiu, Liu Ling, Wang Rong and Ruan Xian.

The figures on the brick paintings are Ji Kang, Ruan Ji, Shan Tao, Wang Rong, Xiang Xiu, Liu Ling, Ruan Xian and Rong Qiqi.

The brick painting puts Wang Rong behind Shan Tao and puts Rong Qiqi, who came first, at the end.

Moreover, the distance between each character in the scroll is relatively comfortable, which is also the standard painting method for such portraits in the Northern and Southern Dynasties. Each character can be painted independently.

In order to arrange eight people in a limited space and make the characters large enough, the brick painting did not consider leaving blank space at all. The spaces between the characters and tasks were cut off, and one character was placed next to another, making the picture extremely dense.

This is very interesting. The Four Great Masters of the Six Dynasties originally had two painting styles: sparse and dense. Now the craftsmen have squeezed the "sparse" style into the "dense" style.

However, Zhouzhi now has a better solution to the problem of whether brick paintings and silk paintings come from the same original.

Put the fax sent by Jinling Museum into the scanner and scan it into a computer picture. Then take a picture of the painting silk in your hand with a digital camera. Then transfer the digital files of the two photos to the computer. You can make them semi-transparent through graphics processing software, and then zoom in and out for overlapping comparison.

Now Zhou Zhi finally has a digital camera in his hand, and it is a real SLR, which has the standard shape of later Nikon digital cameras.

However, the strange thing is that this camera was jointly developed by Kodak and the Associated Press for the needs of news photographers. Therefore, the upper part of this camera is a Nikon N90 body with a very obvious Nikon logo, and the lower part is a storage unit of the same size as the upper part, with the Kodak logo.

This storage unit of Kodak is actually just a box, which mainly provides an interface between the internal memory flash drive and the camera. To put it bluntly, it is a OEM product with the Kodak logo on it. The real manufacturer is Hongan Digital Group. Each of the internal flash drives can be hot-swapped through the TYPEC interface, but there is a deformed four-leaf clover logo on it.

This camera has 130 million pixels and a high sensitivity of 1600 ISO, making it convenient for journalists to use under limited light sources.

Equipped with this camera, the Vancouver Sun has now become the first newspaper media in the world to use all digital cameras.

The price of this camera was terrible, $17,950, and even for Associated Press members, the internal discount price was only $1,000 less.

Fortunately, Zhou Zhi did not waste the money. As a manufacturer of storage units, the machine he got was just a sample test machine.