Relationship Between Language And Picture Of ’the Book Of Odes’

The Book of Odes, also Odes or the Three hundred Poems, is the first collection of Chinese poetry, comprising about305works dating from the beginning of West Zhou to the Middle of the Spring and Autumn Period. Since the emergence of its text, later artists complemented the Book of Odes with images, which can be divided into two types:artistic paintings and practical figures or maps. Compared with Songs of the South and the Classic of Mountains and Rivers, the images of the Book of Odes are rare, which conflicts with the great influence of its text. The authority of the emperors may be the direct cause of sharp reduction of these images. Therefore, owning to the intense political and religious orientation of the book, the first type of images have some kind of limitations such as its rare number and excessive orientation.This article comprised three chapters and a conclusion. By discussing the relation between images and text of the Book of Odes in and out of art history and the language-picture relation in the motif of the Book of Odes, taking images of Odes of Bin in all ages and two volumes of images of Odes of Tang for example. This article has summarized the characteristics rendered by the language-picture relation, such as the selection for text by images and multiple types of images rendering including figures and maps, and its characteristics and status in the history of Chinese literature-image relation. Through systematic description and analyses of the language-picture development of the Book of Odes, we have reflected the characteristics of images in this book in different ages and the impact of economic and political background.Our study’s significance is to take text of the Book of Odes as clues and text-image relation as theme with a collection of images of the book in all ages including text-related or recreated images such as the paints of birthday in relation with Odes of Bin in Ming Dynasty. We believe this study is helpful for expanding the path of the study of the book and offering a case study to Chinese text-image relation research.