A Research On The ’Cao Painting Academy’ In Dunhuang

The Cao Painting Academy was an institution of painting that emerged in the Dunhuang region during the period of Guiyi Army dominated by the Cao family. Led by the government, it constructed and painted the grottoes according to the administrative volition of the government, which positively promoted the later development of Buddhist art of Dunhuang. The Cao Painting Academy was formed on the basis of the painters’ guild that had long existed in Dunhuang, so it generally retained the guild’s personnel composition system and its division and collaboration mechanism. For example, the painter crew was composed of official learned scholars, common governmental painters, craftsmen and so on. They were all governed by the mater builder. These job positions still existed in many nongovernmental painting galleries and academies and, to some degree, in the personnel composition of the official painting academies even after the disintegration of the Cao Painting Academy. Compared with other painting academies, the uniqueness of the Cao Painting Academy lies in that it could completely finish the whole process of Buddhist grotto art, from the excavation of grottoes to the completion of murals. It especially set up job positions like grotto excavators, plasterers, ash handlers, carpenters, sculptors and so on. The murals created by the Cao Painting Academy are mainly found in the 98 th, 100 th, 256 th, 25 th, 61 st, 55 th and 454 th ones of the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang and their themes include paintings evolved from Buddhist scriptures, narrative paintings, portraits, architecture and landscape paintings and so on. At that time, the Cao regime needed to construct plenty of grottoes to achieve its political objectives, while hiring nongovernmental folk painters would make it difficult to fully control the whole staff. Therefore, it was necessary for the Cao regime to build its own professional grotto excavation and painting team. The formation of the Cao Painting Academy system had important influences on the painters when they were creating murals. This resulted in the unique characteristics of murals during that period, because the Cao Painting Academy represented a combination of politics and art. This paper investigates the Cao Painting Academy. It reviews the formation and development of the Cao Painting Academy, explores the additional intentions of the Cao regime in constructing the grottoes and further analyzes the manifestation characteristics of the murals in them. This paper explains the various significances of the ‘Cao Painting Academy’.