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Objects, artifacts, works of art are sometimes said to speak to us more directly, less ambiguously than words. I am not at all sure that this is true. With objects, just as with words, we must understand their 'grammar'. I borrow this idea from one of the best books on the interpretation of Chinese 'objects', unfortunately not yet translated into English, Michel Culas, Grammaire de l'objet chinois (Paris , Les éditions de l'amateur, 1997). In this marvellous, beautifully illustrated and arranged book Culas has unveiled the levels of meaning in Chinese objects such as those in this exhibition. He shows how objects speak to us through their symbolic language, through their function and use, their texture (it is always frustrating if understandable not to be able to touch objects in an exhibition), and through their appearance - their colour, their shifting aura in different lighting conditions, their shape.

Fundamentally, though, he shows that objects are embedded in culture, and that serious misunderstandings can arise if this is not appreciated. In the history of one of the earliest modern encounters between cultures, that of the Jesuit missionaries in China and the high culture of China, there were many incidents that demonstrate fusion of horizons or viewpoints, and many that show simply confusion. Today I want to discuss three examples: Madonnas, sceptres and clocks.

Madonna or Guanyin?

The pioneer, and perhaps best known of all the Jesuit missionaries is Matteo Ricci who arrived in China a little over four hundred years ago, and in Beijing, on which our interest focuses, exactly four hundred years ago next January. Ricci, like his European Jesuit confreres, appreciated the value of pictures to convey his religious message. He brought with him several religious paintings and displayed them both to attract attention to their religious message and to promote western art with its oil paints and its techniques of perspective and chiaroscuro that contrasted with Chinese art techniques.

However, what we are interested in is not the technical side but the cultural knowledge and assumptions that lay behind the message. These often led to misconceptions. At the very first Jesuit mission station in Zhaoqing, Guangdong province, Ricci and his companion, Michele Ruggieri, had placed a painting of the Madonna and Child on display. Ricci described in his memoirs what happened:

To this image of the Madonna and to her son, which we had placed on the altar, all the mandarins and other literati and the common people, even the ministers of the idols, who came to visit the Fathers, all of them paid their respects, making their genuflexions and bows right down to the ground with the utmost respect, and they admired the technique of our painting. However, a short time afterwards, in the place of the Madonna, was put another of the Saviour for this reason that the Fathers while saying we had to adore one God alone, had not yet been able to proclaim the mystery of the Incarnation. So, seeing the image of the Madonna on the altar, the Chinese had become a little confused and many had gone around saying everywhere that the God that we adored was a woman.(1)

What was that confusion? Surely not just the female rather than male god. Rather, I strongly suspect they identified the Madonna and Child with the Bodhisattva Guanyin, the bringer of children. This is confirmed by a later incident.

When Ricci finally made his way north along the Grand Canal towards the capital, in August 1600 he reached Linqing in Shandong where he encountered Liu Zongzhou, the Superintendant of Rice Transport. Liu was impressed by the painting he saw on Ricci’s boat of a Madonna with the young Jesus and John the Baptist. Of course he told his wife about it that night and she immediately said she had had a dream about ‘a pagoda, that is one of their gods, with two children at the side…It seemed to her that her dream contained some sort of mystery’. The upshot was that she asked for a copy of the painting which a young Chinese painter(2) accompanying the Jesuits duly made and they presented to Liu who ‘was very pleased and thanked the Fathers saying that they would pray before it in his house(3). The Jesuits presumably were happy at the thought of a Madonna being venerted in this influential household , but one supects that Mrs. Liu was busy praying before the painting to Guanyin for two sons.

When, a little later, the Jesuits met up with the influential eunuch Ma Tang who was attempting to get the credit for presenting their gifts, he ‘venerated on his knees’ the icon of the Madonna and promised her that he will give her a place in the Palace of the Emperor(4). However, Ma’s memorials were rejected and he became irate with the Jesuits and searched their belongings for the cause of his ill luck. He discovered a crucifix with realistic details including bloody wounds, and interpreted it, not unreasonably, as a fetish to perform sorcery against the Emperor(5). Again we can only guess the beliefs that led to these actions on the part of the ruthless and feared eunuch, but they certainly involved interpretations at cross purposes to those of the Jesuits.

Later, when the Jesuits were established in Beijing they succeeded in presenting their gifts, including the paintings, to the Wan Li Emperor. He is said to have exclaimed on seeing the painting of Jesus: ‘This is a living Buddha!’. He gave the two paintings of the Madonna, one with the child Jesus and John the Baptist, and one of the Madonna and child (a reproduction of the Madonna of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome) to his mother. She, ‘a great devotee of the idols’ according to Ricci, used burn incense before the latter every day until she grew afraid at its lifelikeness and put it away in her storeroom where the eunuchs showed it to visitors, presumably for a fee(6).

1 Translated from Fonti Ricciane, ed. P.M.D’Elia, S.J., Vol.I, Roma (Libreria dello Stato) 1942, N245, pp.193-4.
2 This was You Wenhui (Emmanuel Pereira) who later became a Jesuit brother.
3 Fonti Ricciane, vol.II, 1949, N579, p.105.
4 Ibid., N583, p.110.
5 Ibid., N588, p.115.
6 Ibid., N593, p.125.