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The Southern School (南宗画, pinyin: ''nanzhonghua'') of Chinese painting, often called "literati painting" (文人画, ''wenrenhua''), is a term used to denote art and artists which stand in opposition to the formal Northern School of painting. The distinction is not geographic, but relates to the style and contents of the works, and to some extent to the position of the artist. Typically, where professional, formal painters were classified as Northern School, scholar-bureaucrats who had either retired from the professional world or who were never a part of it constituted the Southern School.〔Sickman, 334〕 According to William Watson, while the Northern School contains "the painters who favour clear, emphatic structure in their compositions, with the use of explicit perspective devices", the Southern School "cultivate a more intimate style of landscape bathed in cloud and mist, in which pleasing calligraphic forms tend to take the place of conventions established for the representation of rocks, trees, etc. The painter of the Southern School was interested in distant effects, but his colleague of the Northern School paid more attention to the devices of composition which achieve the illusion of recession, and at the same time more attentive to close realism of detail. ... some artists hover between the two".〔Watson, 86〕 A more philosophical distinction is that the Southern School painters "were thought to have sought the inner realities and expressed their own lofty natures" while the Northern "painted only the outward appearance of things, the worldly and decorative".〔Sickman, 334〕 Never a formal school of art in the sense of artists training under a single master in a single studio, the Southern School is more of an umbrella term spanning a great breadth across both geography and chronology. The literati lifestyle and attitude, and the associated style of painting, can be said to go back quite far to early periods of Chinese history. However, classification of the "Southern School" as such, that is, the coining of the term, is said to have been made by the scholar-artist Dong Qichang (1555-1636), who borrowed the concept from Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism, which also has Northern and Southern Schools.〔Sickman, 334〕 ==Style and subjects== Generally, Southern School painters worked in ink wash painting with black ink, and focused on expressive brushstrokes and a somewhat more impressionistic approach than the Northern School's formal attention to detail and use of color and highly refined traditional modes and methods. The stereotypical literati painter lived in retirement in the mountains or other rural areas, not entirely isolated, but immersed in natural beauty and far from mundane concerns. They were also lovers of culture, hypothetically enjoying and taking part in all Four Arts of the Chinese Scholar as touted by Confucianism, that is, painting, calligraphy, music, and games of skill and strategy. They would often combine these elements into their work, and would gather with one another to share their interests. Literati paintings are most commonly of landscapes often of the ''shanshui'' (山水, "mountain water") genre, and feature scholars in retirement, or travellers, admiring and enjoying the scenery, or immersed in culture. Figures are often depicted carrying or playing ''guqin'' (zithers), and residing in quite isolated mountain hermitages. Calligraphic inscriptions, either of classical poems or ones composed by a contemporary literati (the painter, or a friend), are also quite common. However, while this sort of landscape, with certain features and elements, is the standard stereotypical Southern School painting, the genre actually varied quite widely, as the literati painters themselves, in rejecting the formal strictures of the Northern School, sought the freedom to experiment with subjects and styles. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Southern School」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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