As a pair of conservators at Chicago's
Field Museum slowly unrolled an “ancient Chinese scroll
earlier this year, it dramatically revealed how far the
Christian faith has traveled since that first Christmas
in Bethlehem,” reports Ron Grossman of the
McClatchy-Tribune News, Illinois (June 7, 2008):
Though the delicate watercolor of a Madonna and Child is
among the oldest visual evidences of Christianity in the
Far East, the museum had prosaically dubbed it "catalog
number 116027." For decades, it sat in a dimly lit case,
cracked and soiled. The details were hard to discern. "I
only began to realize how important this thing is when
we (recently) had it restored," said curator Bennet
Bronson. "Look." His finger hovered above the figure of
a European-looking Mary holding an infant Jesus with a
forelock knotted in the Chinese style. That
multicultural iconography witnesses Christianity's
ability to cross cultural borders, noted Bronson, an
anthropologist.
The
scroll was signed in the lower left-hand corner with the
characters for “Tang Yin,” the name of a famous artist
who lived from about 1470 to 1523. Recent scholars have
pointed to a striking similarity between the image on
the scroll and the well-known painting, Salus Populi
Romani, which resides in a church in Rome. They
believe that missionaries brought a copy of the painting
to China, where it was copied by the scroll’s artist.
Lauren
Arnold, an art historian and fellow of the Ricci
Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History at the
University of San Francisco, believes that Salus
Populi Romani appeared in China well before the
17th-century and the arrival of the Jesuits. She
contrasted the figures in the Madonna and Child scroll
with the Chinese goddess of mercy, Guanyin, “a
Madonna-like figure.” Before the arrival of the
missionaries, Guanyin was rendered in art as a solitary
figure. In the Field Museum scroll, Arnold discerns the
completion of a “cultural transformation,” with Guanyin
representing the Blessed Virgin, and a Chinese infant
representing Jesus.
"To
me, the Field Museum's scroll is the missing link," said
Arnold, who is the author of
Princely Gifts and Papal Treasures: The Franciscan
Mission to China and its Influence on the
Art of the West 1250-1350.
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