arising from the exhaustion of a world which even thus
retained a certain primitive ruggedness, was succeeded by a stupendous
movement which followed in the wake of the preaching of Buddhism. With the
new gods we see the first appearance of definite and long-continued
foreign influences. Civilization was transformed and took on new life.
Then, as in the days of the great forerunners of the Florentine
Renaissance, there appeared a whole group of artists, prepared by the art,
at once crude and refined, of an earlier people. This group set resolutely
to work at the close study of forms, ascertaining the laws of their
structure and the conditions of the environment which produced them. The
period in which the work of Li Ss[)u]-hsuen, Li Chao-tao and Wang Wei was
produced may be likened to the fifteenth century in Florence with
Pisanello, Verocchio, Ghirlandajo and Masaccio. Similar conditions gave
birth to a movement that is directly comparable with the Italian movement
for, no matter how varied the outward appearances due to differences of
race and civilization, the fundamentals of art are the same everywhere and
pertain to the same mental attitudes.

The great leaders in periods preceding the T'ang dynasty paved the way to
the culmination which took place in the Sung period, and thus the fruit of
that prolonged activity is seen ripening between the tenth and the
thirteenth centuries. Through the gropings of the primitive period, the
heterodox philosophies and the mystic stirrings of Buddhism, Eastern
thought had arrived at an unquestionably noble comprehension of existence.
The impersonal mystery of the universe, its mighty principle, its manifold
manifestations and the secret which unveils itself in the innermost soul
of things are the conceptions which form the inspiration of Chinese
painting. These lofty thoughts are the source of that spirituality which
declares itself therein with such nobility. The religion to which they are
due will seem perhaps, to certain people, to be broader and less trammeled
than our own. There is no doubt that the entire Far East was under the
spell of its grandeur.

Up to this point art had sounded every depth and attained the highest
summits of human achievement. Thenceforward it concerned itself with
varying manifestations which were only the different modes of a formula
that was still flexible, until the time when--the great inspirations of
the past forgotten--there appear signs of a spi