Giuseppe Castiglione (1715): A Jesuit Painter at the Qing Court

Giuseppe Castiglione was an Italian Jesuit painter who arrived in Beijing in 1715 and spent the rest of his life serving three emperors of the Qing dynasty. Known in China as Lang Shining, he created a new style of court painting that combined European realism and perspective with Chinese materials and formats, and he left some of the best-known images of eighteenth-century China.

From Milan to Beijing

Castiglione was born in Milan on 19 July 1688 and trained as a painter there. In 1707 he joined the Society of Jesus in Genoa as a lay brother, a member of the order who was not a priest. The Jesuits, who had been at the Chinese court since the mission of Matteo Ricci, knew that the emperor valued skilled artists and craftsmen, and they chose Castiglione for China.

He sailed from Lisbon in 1714, reached Macau in 1715 and arrived in Beijing late that year. He was presented to the Kangxi Emperor and set to work in the palace workshops, where European painters and clockmakers served alongside Chinese artisans.

Painting for three emperors

Castiglione had to adapt his training. Chinese patrons disliked strong shadows, which looked to them like dirt on a face, so he developed a softer modelling of light. He learned to paint on silk and paper with Chinese brushes and pigments, and worked in Chinese formats such as hanging scrolls and long handscrolls.

Under the Yongzheng Emperor he produced Gathering of Auspicious Signs (1723) and the handscroll One Hundred Horses (1728), which shows horses and grooms in a landscape with convincing depth. He also assisted the official Nian Xiyao with Shixue (“The Study of Vision”), a Chinese treatise on linear perspective published in 1729 and revised in 1735.

His closest patron was the Qianlong Emperor, who reigned from 1735. Castiglione painted his formal portraits, his consorts, his hunts and favourite horses and dogs. Often he painted the faces and animals while Chinese colleagues added the landscapes, a form of team work typical of the palace studios.

Among the best known of these works is a long handscroll, begun at the start of Qianlong’s reign in 1736, with portraits of the new emperor, his empress and eleven consorts, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Another, Kazakhs Presenting Horses in Tribute (1757), in the Musée Guimet in Paris, records an embassy from the steppe and shows how the court used painting to celebrate its frontier diplomacy. Castiglione also painted series of the emperor’s favourite horses and hunting dogs, each identified by name.

He was a teacher as well as a painter. From the Yongzheng period onwards Chinese students in the palace workshops learned oil painting and perspective from him, and several of them later worked on court projects in his manner, so his influence continued after his death.

Architect and chronicler

In 1747 Qianlong asked the Jesuits to build European-style palaces in a corner of the Yuanmingyuan, the imperial garden north-west of Beijing. Castiglione designed the buildings, known as the Xiyang Lou, while the French Jesuit Michel Benoist engineered their fountains. Most of them were wrecked in the burning of the Old Summer Palace in 1860, and only stone ruins remain.

The Xiyang Lou combined Italian Baroque facades, carved marble and glazed tiles with Chinese roofs and garden settings. They were never meant as residences but as curiosities for the emperor’s pleasure, and a set of copper engravings made by court artists in the 1780s records how they looked before their destruction.

In his last years Castiglione helped prepare drawings of Qianlong’s victories in Central Asia, including the conquest of the Dzungar Khanate. These Conquests of the Western Regions were sent to Paris to be engraved on copper and printed in the 1760s and 1770s.

Missionary and courtier

Castiglione remained a Jesuit throughout his life, but Christianity had been banned under Yongzheng in 1724. During later persecutions he is said to have appealed to Qianlong on behalf of Christians, with little success. His position depended entirely on the emperor’s goodwill, and he worked almost daily in the palace for decades.

The emperor valued him highly, and in 1757 the court marked his seventieth birthday by Chinese reckoning with gifts and honours. He died in Beijing on 17 July 1766, two days before his 78th birthday. Qianlong granted him a posthumous official rank and funds for his funeral, and he was buried in the Jesuit cemetery in the capital.

Timeline

• 1688, 19 July: Castiglione is born in Milan.
• 1707: He joins the Jesuits in Genoa as a lay brother.
• 1715: He arrives in Macau and then Beijing.
• 1728: He completes One Hundred Horses.
• 1747: Work begins on the European palaces of the Yuanmingyuan.
• 1766, 17 July: He dies in Beijing.

Why it matters

Castiglione was one of the most successful cultural go-betweens of the early modern world. His paintings shaped how the Qing court presented itself and how Europeans later imagined China, and they remain treasured in the palace museums of Beijing and Taipei.