An Account Of Jesuit Missionary Activity In 17th Century China

Field Musuem: Madonna and Child
'UNIVERSAL RELIGION'

"He wanted to make it clear that Christianity was a universal religion," Bronson said. He added the scroll, which was painted on paper and backed with cloth, not only illustrates the long road Christianity took to China; it also survived the ups and downs the faith went through there, only to be subject to the vicissitudes of modern scholarship. It was brought to Chicago by Berthold Laufer, a museum staffer who bought it in 1910 from a prominent family in Singan, China, that had owned it for many generations. Laufer was something of an Indiana Jones, a freewheeling scholar with a taste for exotic travel.

He was one of a few, if not the only, American academics of his day to speak Chinese (in addition to eight other Asian languages.) He dated the scroll to the 17th Century, a period when Jesuit missionaries were known to have arrived in China.

Laufer didn't, however, compare notes with scholars of religion. Most then were clergy and he had a decided distaste for men of the cloth. He dismissed the inspiration for the Madonna scroll as that "wretched, hypocritical Christian religion." In the scroll's lower left corner are two Chinese characters representing the name of a famed artist, Tang Yin, who lived from about 1470 to 1523.

Because that was before the Jesuit period, Laufer decided the signature was a forgery, subsequently added to protect the painting's owners during a period when Christianity was suppressed in China.

FAITH IN DISGUISE

Chinese emperors sometimes declared missionaries and converts personae non gratis, Bronson noted. It was for the same reason the communist regime has persecuted Catholic bishops: Religious attachments to Rome were seen as disloyalty. So a Chinese family with Christian roots would have two choices: Destroy the evidence of their piety, or disguise it - in the case of the Madonna scroll, by adding the name of a noted artist, who presumably lived before the time of the Christian missions. " Thus (Tang Yin's) distinguished name was in every respect a charm and amulet which saved the life of this memorable painting," Laufer wrote in a paper describing his find.

But in more recent decades, opinion about the scroll has shifted, noted Lauren Arnold, an art historian and fellow of the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History at the University of San Francisco.

First, scholars noticed a striking similarity between the scroll and a famous painting, Salus Populi Roman i, housed in a church in Rome. It seemed likely that missionaries had carried a copy of the earlier work to China, where it, in turn, was copied by the scroll's artist.

EARLIER MISSIONARIES

Arnold said that prototype arrived long before Laufer's dating of the scroll. She explained that since his time, scholars have become more aware that the Jesuits weren't the first to missionize the East. Nestorian Christians were there perhaps as early as the 5th Century; Franciscans arrived during the time of the famed Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. Then the history of Christianity in China gets obscure, until the Jesuit missions, hundreds of years later. "To me, the Field Museum's scroll is the missing link," said Arnold, author of "Princely Gifts and Papal Treasures: The Franciscan Mission to China and its Influence on the Art of the West 1250-1350." She noted that Chinese tradition long revered a ( I believe this is a reach and not based in fact, idea promoted by anti- Catholic's ) Madonna-like figure, Guanyin, a goddess of ( Vegetarianism ) mercy. However, before missionaries arrived, she was depicted as a solitary figure. "Then the Franciscans arrive, and suddenly Guanyin is given a male child," Arnold said. "When the Franciscans brought pictures of a Madonna and Child, the Chinese must have said, 'Wow! We can relate to that." 'The Field Museum scroll', she added, completes that cultural transformation: Guanyin has morphed into the Virgin, and Jesus has been transformed into a Chinese infant. Arnold thinks Laufer got it wrong: the signature on the scroll truly is that of a 15th and 16th Century artist. To her mind, it testifies to how quickly China incorporated Christian ideas into its own.

PS their are tinges of anti-Catholicism in this article
Link to the full length article in The Lakelend Ledger entitled Madonna's Travels (here)