Also tenkei jinbutsu 点景人物. Small-sized human
figures and animals added as secondary elements to a landscape painting. The addition
of such figures enlivens the scene and, in comparison to the towering landscape
forms, their smallness lends a sense of the figures being immersed deep within
the landscape. The comparison shows man in his proper, insignificant place in
nature. Literati artists in both China and Japan often imagined themselves as
one of these hermetic figures in the landscapes they created, especially when
they were unable to live the kind of simple, uncomplicated life to which they
aspired. |