The Ordination Scroll of Empress Zhang (1493) in the San Diego Museum of Art, a highlight at the Taoism and the Arts of China exhibition in 2000, is an unusual object among surviving visual material from Ming dynasty China (1368 – 1644). At over twenty-seven metres long, the scroll contains meticulously painted images and a detailed inscription that records the Daoist ordination of Empress Zhang (1470 – 1541), consort of the Hongzhi emperor (r. 1488 – 1505) by the Orthodox Unity institution. The event it documents, which elevates the empress into the celestial realm, would be unknown to history if not for the survival of this scroll. This dissertation is an in-depth study of the Ordination Scroll that also considers its implications for understanding the activities of empresses and their representations during the Ming dynasty. The first three chapters of this dissertation closely examine the material, visual and textual aspects of the Ordination Scroll. The remaining two chapters situate the scroll within the broader activities of Ming empresses. A complete translation of the main inscription in the scroll is provided in the appendix.

Orientador: Leandro Karnal / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-18T12:56:23Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Tatsch_FlaviaGalli_D.pdf: 40321222 bytes, checksum: cb66576be2b3a95a377510525367def0 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011 / Resumo: Este estudo apresenta uma reflexão sobre a construção da imagem visual da América nos séculos XV e XVI. O reconhecimento do potencial cognitivo da gravura como documento e a percepção do conjunto de relações que perpassam cada uma delas foram fatores importantes ao longo da pesquisa. Procurava-se entender de que forma as estampas eram o resultado de aspectos discursivos, da absorção das informações etnográficas e das operações de tradução e lugar de enunciação do Outro. Para isto, dividimos esta tese em três capítulos. O primeiro se ocupa da reflexão sobre a diversidade das imagens e das perguntas que podem ser feitas a elas, assim como a contribuição de alguns autores para essa discussão. O segundo capítulo trata das xilogravuras impressas para acompanhar as cartas sobre de Cristóvão Colombo e Américo Vespúcio. Entremeadas à escrita, não necessariamente pretendiam representar a realidade americana, mas traduzi-la em ilustrações compreensíveis ao público. O terceiro capítulo analisa dois momentos específicos: a construção de uma imagem a partir de estereótipos aliados à representação de objetos descontextualizados de seu uso original; e a personificação da América em alegorias. A conclusão diz respeito às sucessivas camadas que moldaram gradualmente a imagem visual da América e os significados diversos que dela emanavam / Abstract: This study presents a reflection on the construction of the visual image of America in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The recognition of the cognitive potential of images as documents and the perception of the set of relationships that permeate each one of them were important factors during the research. The aim was to understand in which way the prints became the result of discursive aspects of the absorption of ethnographic reports and operations of translation and loci of enunciation of the Other. To accmplish this, we divide this, this thesis was divided into three chapters. The first one addresses reflections about the diversity of the images and questionings that could arise to them, as well as the contributions of several authors to this discussion. The second chapter deals with the woodcuts that accompany the printed letters by Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci. Interspersed in the writing, they did not necessarily intend to represent the American reality, but translate it into illustrations understandable to the public. The third chapter discusses two specific moments: the construction of an image from stereotypes associated with the representation of objects detached from their original context of use, and the personification of America in allegories. The conclusion refers to the successive layers that gradually shaped the visual image of America and the different meanings thereby conveyed / Doutorado / Historia Cultural / Doutor em História

This thesis studies Han Dynasty stone carved tombs in Central and Eastern China. These multi-chambered tombs were constructed from carved stone slabs, and were very popular among the Han people. However, such horizontal stone structures were entirely new, and were a result of outside stimuli rather than an independent development within China. The stone carved tombs were a result of imitating royal rock-cut tombs, while the rock-cut tombs were stimulated by foreign examples. Moreover, many details of stone carved tombs also had Western features. These exotic elements were incorporated to satisfy specific requirements of the Han people, and reflected the desire to assimilate exotica within Chinese traditions. Some details within stone carved tombs showed high level of stone working technologies with Western influences. But in general the level of stone construction of the Han period was relatively low. The methods of construction showed how unfamiliar the Western system was to the Han artisans. Han Dynasty stone carved tombs were hybrids of different techniques, including timber, brick and stone works. From these variations, Han people could choose certain types of tombs to satisfy their specific ritual and economic needs. Not only structures, but also pictorial decorations of stone carved tombs were innovations. The range of image motifs is quite limited. Similar motifs can be found in almost every tomb. Such similarities were partly due to the artisans, who worked in workshops and used repertoires for the carving of images. But these also suggest that the tombs were decorated for certain purposes with a given functional template. Together with different patterns of burial objects and their settings, such images formed a way through which the Han people gave meaning to the afterworld. After their heyday, stone carved tombs ceased being constructed in the Central Plains as the Han Empire collapsed. However, they set a model for later tombs. The idea of building horizontal stone chamber tombs spread to Han borderlands, and gradually went further east to the Korean Peninsula. The legacy and spread of the Chinese masonry tradition was closely related to the political circumstances of late Han and post-Han period. The spread of stone chamber tombs in Northeast Asia is presented as a part of a long history of interactions between different parts of Eurasia.

This thesis is an enquiry into the conditions in which various understandings of the newly introduced but vaguely grasped Western notion of ‘art’ emerged and sustained themselves in the name of cultural reproduction in early twentieth-century China. This Western concept of art was translated into Chinese as ‘meishu’, a neologism originally coined in Japanese kanji, and regarded as the embodiment of the ‘national essence’. Through a close examination of five art-related publishing events—the publication of the nationalistic journal Guocui xuebao; the launch of the art periodical Shenzhou guoguangji; the endeavours to compile a book collection on art, Meishu congshu; the making of the text Zhonguo yishujia zhenglüe which claimed to be a history book of Chinese ‘meishu’; and an example of image appropriation from Stephen Bushell’s Chinese Art—this thesis explores the ways in which different ‘neologistic imaginations’ of the term ‘meishu’ were constructed through publishing practices attempting to preserve and reproduce the ‘national essence’, by creating from the existent tradition a category of ‘art’ equivalent to that in the European West. Unlike previous scholarship, which deems any understanding of ‘meishu’ that deviated from the ‘authentic’ European model a ‘misconception’, this thesis sees these disparate understandings of ‘meishu’ as equally valid statements competing for dominance in the discursive field of art. This thesis thus argues that there existed at least three modes of utterances regarding the notion of ‘meishu’ in early twentieth-century China, and that the success of any such given utterance depended upon the acceptance of the authentic quality argued in its strategy of cultural reproduction. This thesis hence not only offers a detailed analysis of each publishing event, but also provides an interpretative framework within which the recognition of these utterances can be analysed by their strategic approaches to claiming cultural authenticity.

The dissertation analyses the reliefs and paintings on thirty-one different tombs in Western Anatolia erected between 600 and 450 BC, in order to illuminate the ways in which non-Greek elites were identified on their memorials. The tombs from three areas are treated: Phrygia, Hellespontine Phrygia and Lydia, where the primary language groups were Phrygian, Mysian and Lydian. There is little literary evidence for these regions, and what there is tends to focus on political developments. Descriptions of people and society are few, and tend to represent them from an outside perspective, grouping them according to cultural characteristics which differentiate them from Greeks. It is clear, however, that the regions were important, prosperous places, controlled by illustrious grandees and land marked with a relatively high proportion of monumental tombs. Of these monumental tombs, there is a relatively high number decorated with striking and articulate images. There is much to be gained from examining the images on these tombs, as ‘indigenous’ sources for how elite Western Anatolians described themselves. Previous approaches to the tombs and their images have tended to look at them individually or in smaller groups, and to concentrate on the transmission and reception of Persian and Greek culture in the Achaemenid provinces. This dissertation contributes a broader comparative study of the decorated tombs, focussing on the kinds of statuses the images represent and the cultural forms these took. By comparing the various methods of self-representation, it clarifies patterns of identities in Western Anatolia and their relationship to historical circumstances. The dissertation is divided into five chapters. An introduction outlines the scope and sample, the historical background, previous studies of the monuments, the definition of ‘identity’ and the methods of analysis adopted here. Three case study chapters present the regions and the decorated monuments within them. A concluding chapter synthesises three aspects: social identities (roles and spheres of life represented); geographic and chronological patterns; and cultural affiliations and orientations. The dissertation concludes that a tension between Persian identities and local traditions is evident in some of the tomb images, which relates to the political upheavals in Western Anatolia and the Aegean at the time of the Persian Wars.