Simulated Landscape Paintings: Newly Unearthed Tomb Murals in Tang China

By focusing on six recently discovered tomb murals dating from the eighth to early tenth centuries that simulate landscape paintings in content and format, I articulate a new methodological framework to investigate a series of unexplored issues in the early history of Chinese landscape painting. By simultaneously examining the murals’ pictorial and architectural contexts in the underground tombs and their connections with the “real” landscape paintings they imitate, I experiment with a more thorough integration of connoisseurship-based painting scholarship and archaeology-based studies of tomb art, which have largely been considered two separate fields in Chinese art history.