Southern Song Dynasty Calligraphers And The "four Great Poets Of Calligraphy

Southern Song Dynasty is rather a special section throughout the calligraphy history of China. It was the memories before Wei and Jin Dynasties and at the beginning of China's awakening aesthetic consciousness even developed into the Southern Song Dynasty, which were considered resplendently. Northern song appeared four calligraphers who were Su,Huang, Mi,Cai. And then the community has undergone tremendous changes to Southern Song Dynasty that people suffered great humiliation from JinKang Event which led to the state of lethargy and also there appeared no first-class calligrapher. However, there also still a lot of calligrapher contributed their own strength to the calligraphy art even in such an environment. Though they did not become the top calligraphers and their point of view did not form a complete theoretical system, their expressing of the thoughts and aesthetic taste to calligraphy with verses, inscriptions, etc also inspirited us. We can get more comprehensive perspectives from the southern song dynasty calligraphy through the research on these calligraphers.Predecessors focus on the calligraphy itself of the four with less attention on their theory of calligraphy. And their attention mainly focuses on the research on Luyou and Fan Chengda. They never researched the calligraphy of the four from the whole system perspective, just raised several few remarks to prove their calligraphy writing or found several theoretical basis to support their calligraphy. We should see the calligraphy achievements in addition of the status on the poems of the four although the content of their calligraphy was relatively not so much, and there also existed better books about calligraphy in the southern song dynasty. This paper will research their calligraphy thoughts and creation with the dual perspective of poetry and calligraphy though a comprehensive perspective.This article is divided into four sections. The first section is an introduction, which teases out the general context of the development of calligraphy for the later pave of introducing the Southern Song Dynasty calligraphy. In order to make readers understand this paper better, it also gives the origin of the Four Greatest Poets in the Revival Period of Southern Song Dynasty, and the definition of Calligraphy Forum. The second section describes the unique environment of the Southern Song Dynasty calligraphy. In such a far-off dynasty, people's bitter hearts expressed through sitting on the laurels of calligraphy, and the performance of the calligraphy was far behind the predecessors. However, there some people still continued to make their own effects on the creations, the carved posts and the books in such an era. You mao,Yang Wanli,Lu you,Fan Chengda made outstanding contributions in this era. The third section focus on the research of their calligraphy. Firstly, with the expectation to restore their real practice of calligraphy from their poems and works, it researches their calligraphy respectively. Then we attempt to find their common ground treated the four as a whole. We research their consistency from the relationship among wine, personality, poem and calligraphy with the attention not only on the form of calligraphy, but also on their internal consistency.In the fourth section, the four will be placed in the southern song dynasty calligraphy and the development of the southern song dynasty will be reflected from the inspection of them. Although their achievements were no more than the succession of predecessors, they gained some success more or less and also promoted the development of Orchid Pavilion learning. Then this paper gives a brief description of its effect on future generations.This paper attempts to do some more detailed research on the basis of previous results and exhibit the efforts and contributions in the aspect of calligraphy with the connection of creations of poems and calligraphy, among with a link of emotions and experience. Because of living in the same era with the similar social environment, Lu you, Fan Chengda, Yang Wanli, You mao were similar in many aspects, including the calligraphy and poems. And there existed some restrictions among them because of the influences of trend of that time and they also influenced each other. Perhaps the times created the high level of their calligraphy, or perhaps it was destined that their achievements of poems were more than that of calligraphy. This article looks forward to restore their calligraphy achievements in addition to poems at the stage of Southern Song Dynasty with excavating their calligraphy achievements enshrouded under that of poems.