Tuesday, June 30, 2015
Image query
David W in Texas, an old falconer like me, sent this unsourced image. In it, a slightly stylized eagle appears to be attacking a human, while the nose of a tazi just enters lower left. Anybody out there who can translate the title or tell us anything about it? (Style but not subject of art looks Japanese to me).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
Feel free to delete this comment if it's old or inaccurate info!
My computer says: Mongol, Yuan Dynasty, unknown artist.
First, the book. One of a series, apparently, on "ancient masters of painting." Amazon link. Oy, the price.
More about the painting at these links:
The full painting
Detail
And the source page, with a bit more info.
What a scene!
Luisa-- thanks so much! Now I have to find a way to afford the book !
From the look of the full image, it seems possible to interpret this as an intentional attack on the people by a trained eagle (second one ready to be sent) and to the right a tiger, possibly also trained.
Another interpretation but maybe less likely in guessing is that the image depicts people running to save others being attcked by animals acting on their own....
I lean to a pretty dark interpretation, given the title. I am a amateur scholar of Chinese attitudes to nature. There is a recent scholarly book called "The Art of not being Governed", by James Scott, and its thesis is that the lowland empires of Asia have always persecuted mountain tribes, seeing them as bandits, akin to vermin,, not fully human. This looks like some sort of punitive raid combined with a sporting hunt, with a tiger and a mountain dweller both seen as quarry.
The hunters seem to be some kind of ogres or demons...
If you're handy with google translate, you can buy it for around seven dollars here...
http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=35834348576
No doubt some kinda interesting tale behind this painting! My first impression of the limited view was perhaps a person being used to train an eagle, as the pitiful peasant wretch of a boy was in the novel "The Wolves Of Paris" by Daniel Mannix(you'll remember THAT scene, Steve!)--but then on seeing the whole painting--something else entirely going on there! The hunters DO seem to be rather, uh, let's say "rough" looking characters, and the others being attacked more like high class royal types. Perhaps some royalty caught accidentally(or on purpose?) on a game drive, that just so happened to flush a tiger too(musta been a general game drive--I can't imagine they'd use an eagle on a specific tiger hunt!). And are those laika-type DOGS or wolves around the tiger? Very, very interesting, that's for sure. I've read of other European incidents where game drives were used to "accidentally" assassinate certain rulers...L.B.
Post a Comment