Summary
The essay, 'Silk and Skin: Significant Boundaries,' which analyzes a double portrait of Qianlong Emperor Qing Gaozong entitled 'Is It One or Two?' represents a New Sinology that incorporates the study of images into other disciplines. Despite its literary charm, the essay distorts the portrait's formal, iconographic and historical sources because its analysis is based on factual and interpretative errors.
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Extract
Blindness and oversight: some comments on a double portrait of Qianlong and the new sinology.
. . . if an interpretation is not untrue to the facts, the only criteria by which it is to be judged are its originality, suggestiveness, and plausibility.
(Carrier 1990: 666) I One tangible effect of contemporary debates within the humanities, broadly construed, is that formerly rigid and clearly demarcated disciplinary boundaries have become increasingly mutable and permeable. Art historians, for instance, now routinely look to other fields, such as anthropology and literary theory, for methodological and theoretical guidance; at the same time, scholars from other disciplines are increasingly incorporating the study of images, formerly the almost exclusive preserve of art history, into their own interpretive practices. An example of the latter is provided by a recent work entitled "Silk and Skin: Significant Boundaries" (Zito 1994). This essay, written by a historian of religion who is interested in investigating "the relationship of signification and subjectivity in eighteenth-century China" (Zito 1994: 103), has at its core an analysis of a double portrait of Qing Gaozong, the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736-95) [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED],(1) that usually goes by the title "Is It One or Two?" In many ways, "Silk and Skin" is timely in its desire to historicize the imperial portrait and to situate it within a broad, intertextual context. Such practices are characteristic of what has come to be called New Art History, and they also mimic an important recent critical turn in textual studies.(2) Indeed, the essay's emphasis on discursive practices and interpretive procedures that configure "...See the full content of this document
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