While the Sung period was one of perfection in all fields of art, painting undoubtedly gained its highest development in this time.  We find now two main streams in painting:  some painters preferred the decorative, pompous, but realistic approach, with great attention to the detail.  Later theoreticians brought this school in connection with one school of meditative Buddhism, the so-called northern school.  Men who belonged to this school of painting often were active court officials or painted for the court and for other representative purposes.  One of the most famous among them, Li Lung-mien (ca. 1040-1106), for instance painted the different breeds of horses in the imperial stables.  He was also famous for his Buddhistic figures.  Another school, later called the southern school, regarded painting as an intimate, personal expression.  They tried to paint inner realities and not outer forms.  They, too, were educated, but they did not paint for anybody.  They painted in their country houses when they felt in the mood for expression.  Their paintings did not stress details, but tried to give the spirit of a landscape, for in this field they excelled most.  Best known of them is Mi Fei (ca. 1051-1107), a painter as well as a calligrapher, art collector, and art critic.  Typically, his paintings were not much liked by the emperor Hui Tsung (ruled 1101-1125) who was one of the greatest art collectors and whose catalogue of his collection became very famous.  He created the Painting Academy, an institution which mainly gave official recognition to painters in form of titles which gave the painter access to and status at court.  Ma Yuean (c. 1190-1224), member of a whole painter’s family, and Hsia Kui (c. 1180-1230) continued the more “impressionistic” tradition.  Already in Sung time, however, many painters could and did paint in different styles, “copying”, i.e. painting in the way of T’ang painters, in order to express their changing emotions by changed styles, a fact which often makes the dating of Chinese paintings very difficult.

Finally, art craft has left us famous porcelains of the Sung period.  The most characteristic production of that time is the green porcelain known as “Celadon”.  It consists usually of a rather solid paste, less like porcelain than stoneware, covered with a green glaze; decoration is incised, not painted, under the glaze.  In the Sung period, however, came the first pure white porcelain with incised ornamentation under the glaze, and also with painting on the glaze.  Not until near the end of the Sung period did the blue and white porcelain begin (blue painting on a white ground).  The cobalt needed for this came from Asia Minor.  In exchange for the cobalt, Chinese porcelain went to Asia Minor.  This trade did not, however, grow greatly until the Mongol epoch; later really substantial orders were placed in China, the Chinese executing the patterns wanted in the West.

5 Military collapse