百骏图

The man who painted this was an Italian Jesuit named Giuseppe Castiglione, who reached the Chinese court around 1715 and spent the rest of his life there under the name Lang Shining. This scroll of a hundred horses grazing, rolling, and swimming took him roughly five years, finished in 1728 for the Yongzheng emperor. What makes it strange is the collision of two traditions in one surface. The horses have European modelling, real shadow and volume and muscle, set into a Chinese handscroll you unroll from right to left, with pines and distance done in ink. Because silk allows no correction, he worked every figure out first on paper before committing a line. It runs more than seven metres long, so it was never meant to be seen all at once, but read across, a stretch at a time.