Matrivoj · Matteo Ripa's ""Views of Jehol"": Entangled histories of 18th century European and Chinese landscape representations""

The Italian missionary, Matteo Ripa (1682-1746) reportedly introduced a series of copperplate etchings entitled “Views of Jehol”, showing the Emperor Kangxi’s summer palace and gardens to Lord Burlington and his circle (including the landscape designer, William Kent [1685-1748]) in 1724 who then introduced a new style of landscape gardening in England which was known throughout Europe as ‘jardin anglo-chinois.’I propose that these etchings represent not merely the exchange in visual arts between China and Europe as two isolated entities, but rather manifestations of how the cultural and historical entanglements between 18th-century Europe and China interacted with their religious, social-political, and environmental contexts. In detail:1. To examine the relationships between Matteo Ripa’s engravings of the “Views of Jehol” and the original woodcuts of Kangxi’s Thirty-six views, designed by Shen Yu, the 18th-century Chinese landscape garden representation, so as to uncover the symbolism of Matteo Ricci’s Confucian-Christian syncretism and the hermetic-neoplatonic tenets represented by Matteo Ripa’s engravings.2. To examine the relationships between Matteo Ripa’s engravings and William Kent’s landscape garden designs, so as to reveal their interconnectedness in terms of visual features, representational methods and ideologies (i.e. hermetic-neoplatonic tenets).By examining Ripa’s engravings using the concept of ‘entanglements’, it is hoped that the complex connections between European and Chinese landscape gardens within their religious, socio-political and environmental contexts can be better understood, thereby enriching the trans-cultural history of landscape gardens and helping to anchor the notion of an interlinked Eurasian art history.